A two-month audit by LeadVantage found that one in four outbound phone numbers that dealers use to contact leads gets flagged as spam by at least one of the three major phone carriers.
“Any one of those can be flagged as spam by Verizon, T-Mobile, or AT&T, and all of a sudden people are sending your call straight to voicemail,” Woody Hunt, CEO of LeadVantage, said.
LeadVantage is an AI-powered lead evaluation, auditing and monitoring platform that sniffed out the spam situation.
Zooming out: The average dealership may have more than 40 lead forms flying around at any given time.
CRMs and marketing tools help shed light on generated leads and sales follow-ups, but it’s the unknown in-between that could give dealers a blind spot, according to LeadVantage.
“Dealers often don’t even know what they have,” Hunt told CDG News.
The details: To help fix it, LeadVantage created Lead Journey Monitoring, which investigates the systems that connect shoppers to a dealership, including forms, phone numbers, and email accounts, along with how sales teams respond.
“And not only are we mapping what they have, but then we’re testing it to tell them where the the gaps are,” Hunt said.
LeadVantage built the product after years of mystery shopping turned up broken lead forms and unchecked voicemail boxes, Hunt explained.
He said he’s seen leads lost because the CRM inbox they landed in belonged to someone on leave, because an OEM system scrubbed the lead source, and because a dealer switched website providers and a form never got reconnected to the CRM.
Hunt said that for one dealer, an automated email sent to every lead for six months carried the name and phone number of a sales rep who no longer worked there.
For context: The average store LeadVantage monitors has 44 lead forms, 22 inbound phone numbers, 28 email boxes, and 24 outbound phone numbers.
“There’s this web of infrastructure, and it’s it’s really unwieldy for a dealership to to keep track of it all,” Hunt said.
The company launched the product in May, signed its first customers in June, and now monitors on the order of 100 rooftops, Hunt said.
It was during August and September audits that it discovered the one-in-four call stat, which Hunt said is a pricey blind spot.
“That’s got to be costing our industry like 10s of millions of dollars a year,” Hunt said.
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How it works: On the infrastructure side, the tool runs more than 400 automated audits a month across more than 100 contact points per dealership, on average, LeadVantage said.
For lead handling, mystery shops track response time, quality of responses, follow-up cadence, and sentiment.
That matters because a completed form can still register as a conversion upstream while the actual lead never reaches the team responsible for following up.
And once a lead does arrive, slow responses, missed questions, weak appointment-setting, and inconsistent follow-up create more friction.
More findings: About 5% of lead forms had critical issues that could keep inquiries from reaching the dealership.
About 7% of inbound numbers showed problems, including routing errors and dead numbers.
About 16% of outbound email accounts showed deliverability or spam risk.
(By the way, dealerships can book a free Lead Journey Health Check at healthcheck.leadvantage.ai.)
The bottom line: Hunt said the fix is often in a dealer’s own systems, not its ad budget.
“You don’t need more leads,” Hunt said. “You need to focus on your infrastructure, your process, and fix the stuff that’s broken.”
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