The Sales Pipeline Report – Why does it matter?

AutoPlay has over a dozen reports available to make sense of the data captured by the Sales Pipeline.  Understanding these reports and taking action accordingly can make the difference between a good and bad month.
 
One of the more underrated reports is the Sales Pipeline Report – aka the “Donut Report”.  The Sales Pipeline Report measures where in the road to a sale your leads are currently at.  Unlike most of the reports available the Sales Pipeline Report looks at the CURRENT Progress of any leads generated in the reporting period.  For example, if the report is run today for January 1st to 31st you will be able to see whether you have adequately followed up your January leads – useful, right?
 
The best dealerships will be aiming to minimise the number of leads in ‘Awaiting Action’.  Doing so means that your sales team have followed up the lead.  However, the value of this report can be taken even further by combining it with the information learned in other reports.
 
Below is a dealership’s Sales Pipeline Report for April so far.  As you can see the dealership has 42 leads at ‘Awaiting Action’ – meaning they have not actioned these leads at all since they received them.  Checking the dealerships Lead Conversion Report tells us the dealership normally converts 42.9% of their leads to Test Drive, and 19.8% to Sales.

Working on these averages that means that almost 18 of these leads would result in a Test Drive and roughly 8 would end up as a Sale.  When all that is required to convert these leads is to follow up with them, it’s well worth refocussing your sales team to working these leads to generate a few more deals.
 
Similarly, this dealership has 40 leads that are sitting at the Test Drive stage, but have yet to be moved forward to ‘Present Deal’, ‘Finance’ or ‘Sold’.  Given the dealership converts 19.8% of their leads to Sales at the very least there is another 8 sales sitting amongst those 40 people who went for a Test Drive (and that is conservative – not accounting for the fact these customers are already further down the road to a sale than most).
 
Without spending any additional money on marketing or advertising this dealership could potentially achieve 16 more sales just by focusing on the following actions;

1. Ensure Salespeople with any leads at Awaiting Action follow up on these leads
2. Focus on contacting any customer that went for a Test Drive

 
Whilst everyone wants more leads this dealership has approximately 16 deals that are sitting on the table and could be had – just by working whatever leads their marketing/advertising has already generated.
 
If you have any questions about this report and how to interpret it you can email our friendly Support team at support@autoplay.co.nz.