The ready buyer test
Send your store the easiest lead in the world — financing arranged, specific vehicle, wants to come this week — and have the customer never offer to book. Most stores fail it.
If you only ever audit one thing about your internet lead process, audit this one. It is the cheapest test to run and the most uncomfortable result to read.
Send in a lead that is, on paper, the best customer your store will see all month. Financing already arranged. A specific vehicle in mind. Explicitly wants to come in this week. Then instruct that customer to do exactly one unusual thing: never offer a time.
What you are actually measuring
Whether anyone asks for the appointment.
That is it. There is no ambiguity to hide behind. The customer is not price shopping, not credit challenged, not vague about what they want. If the rep does not ask them to come in, there is no excuse available — not a bad lead, not a tough customer, not the market.
Most stores fail the ready buyer, and it is the single most uncomfortable finding you can put in front of a dealer principal.
Why it fails so often
Because a customer this easy triggers the assumption that the appointment will happen on its own. The rep answers the question, gives some information, is perfectly pleasant, and waits. The customer, who was told not to propose a time, waits too. Then the conversation just stops, and everybody files it under they went cold.
The other common failure is a rep who asks once, gets no answer, and never asks again. One assumptive ask followed by silence is not asking for the appointment. It is mentioning it.
The related test worth running at the same time
Run a second shopper who goes warm for two messages and then deliberately goes silent. Then count what happens after the silence.
That one measures persistence, and the results are usually worse than the ready buyer. Most stores stop at two attempts. A handful stop at one. Very few make it past four, which means that everything your store believes about its follow-up discipline is being contradicted by its own message history.
How to run it without blowing it up
- Point it at your own store, not a competitor. The internal version is defensible and useful; the external version raises consent questions that are not worth the finding.
- Fan it out per salesperson rather than per store. A store grade is an argument. A per-rep grade is a coaching plan.
- Tell your floor that audits happen, but never when. Vigilance is the actual product here — a floor that answers every lead quickly because any lead might be audited is exactly the outcome you want.
- Keep every quote. A manager will argue with a score. He cannot argue with his own text message on the screen.
What to do with the result
Not a meeting where scores are read out. Sit with one rep, put their transcript on a screen, and ask them what they would do differently. Then re-run the same test on the same person four weeks later, so the exercise reads as a program rather than an ambush.