Throughout my career in the automotive industry, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such dependency for help as we have going on right now.

I remember the late 1980s and early 1990s when I went through phone books and “cold calling” customers. Or better yet, using my old trusty rolodex. Deals were made on bar napkins, handshakes, or just dropping off a vehicle to a potential customer’s house to “drive for a day or two.”

As a salesperson back then, you took pride in being No. 1 on the board, and you took pride in being able to overcome any objection and sell the vehicle. Building relationships was always the first thing we did to build a name for ourselves and the dealer. If you were having a slow month, you “prospected” and always had business cards to hand out. It taught me that it was on me, not the dealership if I had a bad month.

Well, boy, have the times changed.

After being on the road for basically the last 11 years consulting and training with dealers, I’ve seen a dangerous trend starting, “How much money are we spending on leads?” I completely understand the specific need for leads in today’s market, as walk-in traffic is somewhat non-existent today as it was 25 years ago. Still, when working with salespeople and store managers and seeing what dealer principles are spending each month on the leads, I wonder what the true ROI a dealer gets from them. I’ve worked with stores that give three to four leads per day, and like most salespeople, they would always take the lowest-hanging fruit first, then start working on the next, and so on.

The problem is that three to four more leads would be delivered to them every day. By the end of the week, they would be covered up with providing the low-hanging fruit while the rest of those paid leads washed downriver.

Now I completely understand, “That’s what the BDC or managers are for,” but are we sure these leads have been followed up on to the tune of “ buy or die?”

When talking or training with salespeople across the country and asking them, “How’s your month shaping up?” It’s pretty much the same. “It’s slow because of weather, election, interest rates, etc.” However, one thing that comes up almost every time is, “I haven’t been getting enough leads this month.”

Well, there’s a reason signs in national parks say “please don’t feed the bears.” It makes the bears dependent on the food or in this case, leads.

Most salespeople today either don’t know how to prospect or are just plain complacent with the free leads and income they receive. Wouldn’t we want to start with our repeat and referral customers? It’s fair to say that our closing percentage on a repeat or referral customer is North of 70%; the problem is that 90% of sold customers, on average, are never contacted by the salesperson after the sale again.

So how do we fix this? First and foremost, install processes to confirm every paid-for lead is worked to its fullest potential. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to sell the same number of vehicles every month with fewer paid-for leads?

Proper training on steps to the sale, building value, relationship building, etc., will always be the most important thing we do in this business period, and if we bypass this to buy more leads, we will lose every time.

A mentor told me, “In the absence of value, all you have left is price, and you’ll never beat a customer on price.” Knowing this is true, why do we continually do it?

Dealers quit paying all the money to “fatten” your sales team for hibernation, and let’s get back to what made us successful in the past. Relationships, building value, and keeping our repeat and referral customers close.

If we are still “triple netting” our new vehicles online and pricing our pre-owned vehicles in the dirt, then we live on that no-value, just price theory. We miss those precious opportunities even with a tremendous fixed operations program.

Let’s start this New Year with the belief that throwing out another deer carcass for the sales team to feed on could be hurting them more than helping them and instead teaching them to “eat what they kill,” and by doing so, building a stronger, more committed team overall.

Rob Whistle is the national sales trainer for Automotive Reinsurance Concepts and can be reached at rob@arcdealers.com.