The Australian dealership speed-to-lead guide
Most dealers don't have a lead-volume problem. They have a response problem that starts the second an enquiry lands. Here's the leak in numbers, and how to close it.
You have already paid for the lead. The hard, expensive part of a car sale isn't finding the enquiry. It's answering it in time, qualifying it, and booking the drive before the buyer moves on to the next yard. Most Australian dealerships leak gross at exactly that point, and they leak it quietly.
The response gap is real, and it's measured
In a carsales study of more than 32,000 enquiry responses, about a third of enquirers received no response within 24 hours, and about a third of all enquiries arrived outside business hours. Those two facts compound: the after-hours enquiry is the one most likely to go cold, because the people who could answer it have gone home.
34%
of car-buyer enquiries get no response within 24 hours, and a similar share arrive after hours, when no one is there to answer.
Speed decides the outcome
The classic MIT / InsideSales lead-response study found leads contacted within five minutes are 21× more likely to qualify than those contacted after 30 minutes. Automotive data points the same way: conversion holds up when contact happens inside five minutes and collapses to low single digits after an hour. A human sales desk, however good, physically cannot answer a 9:40pm Saturday enquiry at 9:40pm Saturday. More on the five-minute line →
The leads are your single biggest line item
carsales charges up to $72 per used-car enquiry plus monthly fees; Drive charges around $50 a lead. A 50-car yard routinely spends thousands a month just on the lead pipe. So letting an enquiry sit unanswered until Monday is the most expensive mistake in the building. You've bought the buyer and then ignored them. See the cost of the 34% that go unanswered →
What “good” actually looks like
Typical internet-lead close rates sit around 6%; top performers reach 15%+. The gap is rarely the inventory or the price. It's whether someone:
- engaged the buyer in seconds, day or night, on the channel they used;
- answered from real, in-stock inventory (the right car, the right price, never a guess);
- qualified the buyer and booked a test drive while intent was hot; and
- handed a warm, qualified lead to a named salesperson with the full story attached.
Dealers pay top dollar for leads, then lose a third of them to a clock. The cars are in the yard and the buyers are real. The gross is sitting on the table.
How to close the gap
Closing it means answering every enquiry instantly, around the clock, grounded in your live stock, then qualifying and booking before handing a warm lead to your team. That's the job Dealerloop does: it sits alongside your DMS, answers in seconds by SMS and email, and books the drive, so no enquiry waits until morning.
Figures are cited from research summarised in our white paper, Closing the Loop, including a carsales study of 32,000+ enquiry responses and the MIT/InsideSales lead-response study. Stats are industry findings, not Dealerloop customer results.
See what closing the loop is worth on your own numbers.