6 sales KPIs for dealerships that track success & highlight weaknesses

Key performance indicators (KPIs) measure progress towards a specific goal. Auto dealerships can use multiple KPIs to measure and monitor business performance in areas like sales, management, and operations. The trick is to select the most strategic dealership KPIs. 

Sales KPIs are particularly important at a time when dealerships are facing major challenges and struggling to survive. You need a set of dealership KPIs that allows you to track sales performance in real-time; last month's reports won't help you adapt fast enough.

Thankfully, we now live in the data age. It's easier than ever to obtain and analyse sales data. The following six dealership KPIs are what you need to continuously assess your performance and give your dealership the best chance of survival despite current market downturns.

1. Weekly prospecting quotas

As a dealership, you can no longer afford to sit on your hands and wait for customers to walk through the door. In addition to inbound leads, you must commit to an outbound prospecting strategy with weekly quotas for everyone on your marketing and sales teams.

Having said that, today's outbound sales strategies must adapt to the times. For example, increased access to information means customers now make up their minds about the car they're going to buy and the price they're willing to pay for it before walking into a dealership.

Therefore, your inbound and outbound sales processes must be closely integrated into a seamless, omnichannel experience for your customers. Here are a few pointers for your salesperson KPIs:

• Target warm customers—that is, those you have previously connected with; try cross-selling, after-sales, and selling to those in your service department.
• Train sales reps to help them overcome their natural aversion to cold selling.
• Master social media to identify and nurture new leads.
• Soften your pitch with a diverse outreach strategy (emails, texts, calls, and ads).

Whether you use cold calling or handwritten letters, the key is to track outbound efforts for each member of your team and each campaign. For starters, measure the number of prospects contacted and the total conversion ratios to get a sense of where your outbound efforts are going.

2. Response time

One of the most ignored sales KPIs for dealerships is response time. Data suggests that the average response time to online leads is 12 hours and 45 minutes. That's a lot of time for a prospect to find another website and complete a purchase. 

Every dealership needs lead assignment rules to dictate how leads are contacted, including time frames and specific targets for your team.

The fastest dealers respond to inquiries within 62 seconds and, in turn, enjoy the highest conversion rates. The good news is that modern tools make it easier than ever to be accessible and available to online car shoppers.

• Use AI chatbots and other automated tools for responding during non-business hours.
• Send qualified leads directly to the sales team and have time limits for calling.
• Designate a separate team to respond to leads online by email, texts, or calls.
• At the very least, ensure all inquiries receive a response within the hour.

It's not just the response times that are important, though. The quality of the response and the overall customer experience is critical, so your sales reps should learn how to personalise every response by focusing on customer needs.

3. Follow-up attempts

Fresh leads don't always connect on the first response. The problem is that sales reps automatically assume rejection and stop contacting that lead rather than persist in following up.

Dealer follow-up makes a world of difference in your customer relationship management and, by extension, your bottom line. It's part of a long-term strategy that helps you leverage the power of customer relationships to create repeat business.

You need to monitor how many times a sales rep has attempted to contact a lead. From the time a prospect enters your CRM system, every call, text, email, or live chat should be logged and the results of that interaction documented. 

Follow-up doesn't end when you have an appointment. Even after making the sale, there are other opportunities for dealer follow-up.

• Send an after-sales follow-up to cement the relationship and ensure customer satisfaction.
• Provide helpful and relevant information to keep the relationship alive, such as alerts on new vehicle releases.
• Send non-business messages for birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, and community events.
• Respond to poor customer service experiences even after the problem has been resolved.
• Reward repeat and referral business with a loyalty program.
• Cross-sell with service packages to improve profitability.

As you can see, following up with prospects and customers is a multifaceted process. Every business needs specific dealership KPIs for all follow-up programs to maximise conversion and the lifetime value of each customer.

4. Conversion rates per qualified lead

Closing sales is your dealership's bread and butter, so conversion rates are the most basic, most important sales KPI for dealerships. The conversion rate (CVR) lets you understand the percentage of qualified leads that turn into actual customers.

An increase in your conversion rate leads to a direct  revenue increase and profitability. A high conversion rate points towards effective marketing and successful sales.

To make conversion rate metrics more useful, you should track CVRs for each sales rep and sales channel. For example, have separate CVR reports for your website, walk-in customers, outbound channels, and referrals. 

That way, you will have your ear to the ground and can respond faster when sales slow down on any one channel. For example, a storefront redesign could bring in more walk-in customers, while a new ad campaign could increase business coming through your website.

Once you have identified the factors that increase sales, you can fine-tune your marketing and sales processes for repeatable success.

5. Social media engagement

Social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook are crucial business tools for car salespeople. Integrating a social media strategy into your daily marketing workflows can help you improve sales and create a powerful online brand.

While you’re at it, you need specific goals for your social media strategy and ways to track performance. Some metrics you can track include:

• Frequency of posts on each platform, e.g., posting on Instagram three times a week
• Using social media analytics to monitor non-quantified campaign goals such as community engagement or brand awareness
• Measuring website traffic coming from your social media channels
• Targeting sales generated from leads gained on social media

Social media monitoring is particularly powerful because it helps dealerships track sales performance demographically. For example, car sales data shows a significant shift from SUVs to smaller vehicles, which you can use to target environmentally-minded prospects.

User activity also provides valuable feedback and ways to prospect more leads through special offers such as discounts and competitions.

6. Email Engagement 

Email is a major business artery for auto dealerships, and dealership KPIs should reflect that. If you're not already monitoring email open rates, click-through rates, and replies, you're missing out on a vital opportunity to optimise your email marketing efforts.

You should know how many people are opening and reading your emails and what percentage actually respond to them. It may happen that your emails aren't reaching prospects due to spam filtering, which a good monitoring strategy will help you discover and resolve.

Email engagement is even easier to track than social media, especially when you invest in powerful email marketing tools. These tools let you measure the effectiveness of specific email campaigns and special promotions. You can even A/B test new email structures. 

Email engagement data can also help you identify which demographics are most responsive to your marketing. This information can be used to optimise email content for higher conversion and more sales. Dealerships need to leverage data to curate an organic email list to ensure the best chances of email marketing success.

Leverage easy dealership reporting with SalesLogs

The data and analytics we are talking about here are not the kind you analyse with Excel. Real-time insights from dealership KPIs demand that you use a powerful dealership reporting solution that collects and interprets data on the go so that you can make fine adjustments to your processes.

SalesLogs dealership analytics software offers multi-level reporting on different departments in dealerships, giving you a clear view of your dealership's performance. It is a single source of data-driven truth that helps dealerships maximise profitability through informed decision-making.

Do you want to know how SalesLogs can help you unlock your dealerships' potential? 

Book your demo now to see how insights from dealership KPIs can transform your processes.