It’s possible that dealerships are losing as much as 84 percent or more of their inbound sales calls that are not converted to a deal.

That’s according to a recent analysis by IHS Automotive, commissioned by CallSource, which studied the performance of over 540 of the latter’s dealer customers over a year-long period (from April 2014 to March 2015).

On top of the high number of missed opportunities, the analysis also revealed that CallSource’s top-performing dealers were able, with proper management, to improve the incoming call-to-sale ratio by over 33 percent.

According to ADP Digital Marketing, dealer calls are still outpacing email leads by as much as 4-1, showing that improving in the area of phone handling could possibly work wonders for sales.

“Many dealers think they have a call-handling process in place, yet without phone skills training and missed opportunity alerts, they lose countless sales opportunities every month,” said David Greene, the vice president of CallSource’s auto division. “If call handlers could set just four more appointments each day and convert one of those to a sale, they would add and average of $2,200 in profit to the bottom line each day, or $66,000 per month.”

CallSource listed what it found to be the areas that call handlers fail in most often:

• Rude/unprofessional exchange
• Call handler’s lack of inventory knowledge
• No ‘needs analysis,’ so no alternative vehicle offered
• Call handler fails to ask for appointment
• Call handler asks the prospect to call back
• Salesperson unavailable

More information about CallSource can be found here.