Your Customer Shops for 46.9 Days. Why Does Your Follow-Up Quit After 3?

The short answer: The average used car buyer is in the market for about 46.9 days and spends 14 hours and 38 minutes actively shopping before they sign, according to Cox Automotive's Car Buyer Journey Study as we broke it down on LotTalk this week. Only about three of those hours happen inside the dealership where they eventually buy. The rest is spent online, at other stores, and deciding who earned the right to those three hours. Across Lotpop's dealer partners, roughly half of in-stock inventory has an active lead on it, and half of those leads have gone three or more days without a personal contact. That is where the deal is lost: not at the auction, not at the desk, but in the gap between a 46.9-day buying window and a follow-up process that goes quiet after 72 hours.

By Chris Keene, Coach at Lotpop. Chris spent two decades running variable operations in franchise and independent stores before joining Lotpop as a coach. He reviews lead and inventory activity for dozens of dealer partners every week and co-hosts LotTalk with John Anderson and Renaldo Leonard. Connect with Chris on LinkedIn.

How Long Does a Used Car Buyer Actually Shop Before They Buy?

Longer than your follow-up cadence assumes. I pulled the Cox Automotive numbers on air, and the headline figure was 46.9 days from first shopping activity to purchase on a pre-owned vehicle. Yes, some buyers wake up and have a car in the driveway by dinner. The majority do not.

The time breakdown is what caught John's attention, because it contradicts what most of us assumed. Of the 14 hours and 38 minutes a used buyer spends:

That 49-minute number is the surprise. Buyers used to lean on a brother-in-law or a neighbor. Now the information at their fingertips is unmatched, so they do not need to. Which is exactly why a squeeze page that says “contact us for price” sends them to the next listing without a second thought.

Read the last two cards again. A buyer spends the same three hours at competing stores as they do at the store that wins. Every lead in your CRM has a clock on it, and who gets those three hours is decided during the 46 days before they walk in.

Why Is the Auction Not a Losing Game (and When Does It Become One)?

John asked AI what the number one concern for franchise used car departments is right now, and the answer came back: acquiring the right cars at a cost that still leaves room to make money. One bullet in that summary read “auction is a losing game.” I pushed back hard on that, and I'll stand by it.

If you have no service drive buying program, no internal or outsourced buy team, and no street purchase process, the auction is where your cars come from. Telling that manager the auction is a losing game is useless. What the statement should say is this: the auction is a losing game if you expect auction cars to behave like trades.

Cost of ownership is what you actually have in a unit once buy fee, post-sale inspection, and transportation are added to the hammer price. It is the only real difference between an auction car and a trade. The car is not worse. Your expectation has to change. If you plan on $1,500 to $2,500 front-end on every auction unit, you will be disappointed. If you buy it for the four things I listed on the show (F&I income, service income, trade bait, and market share) and turn it inside the first 30 days, it builds for growth. Renaldo's version: stop swinging for home runs at the auction. Hit singles, know what you'll get, and the runs come.

The losing version looks like this. John was looking at a dealer group with roughly 750 retail used units in stock. Their average cost-to-market across the group is 100%. They start pricing at 98% in the 0 to 15 day bucket and work down from there, and they lean heavily on auction purchases. That math never works, no matter how good the F&I office is. The auction cannot be your main source, and if it is, cost-to-market has to be measured at the moment of purchase, not discovered 30 days later.

What Matters More at Acquisition: Cost-to-Market or Price-to-Market?

Both matter, but one of them tells you what you can actually sell the car for. Cost-to-market is what you own a vehicle for as a percentage of the current retail market. Price-to-market is what you have it listed for as a percentage of that same market. The guides (MMR, KBB, Black Book, J.D. Power) are a look back at how a vehicle traveled before you owned it. Useful, but not the end result.

I put it plainly on the show: if you are selling that type of unit at 97% in your store, in your market, with your people, does it really matter whether you own it at 93% or 94%? No. Understand how your store sells and you can own more cars and retail more cars. Dealers get paralyzed by the volume of data in their tools and forget the simplest question: do I sell this car, and if so, what can I sell it for?

A recent LotTalk guest asked the same question a different way: are you a wholesaler or a retailer? If you are a retailer, the retail exit strategy is the number you build backward from.

How Often Should You Be Repricing in a Shifting Market?

Daily. Not Tuesdays and Thursdays, not every seven days. John has seen vehicles drop 8% to 9% in the market inside a 15-day window, which means a weekly pricing meeting can miss an entire move.

I ran that same 750-unit dealer group through LotWalk and found that 54% of the inventory had already shifted in the market, and on average it had been 14 days since anyone addressed the pricing on those units. Projected forward on current behavior, their 61+ day bucket was on track to grow from 265 units to 315 in two weeks. That is nearly 20% growth in the bucket that eats gross.

No customer will ever walk in and say they noticed you went from 104% to 106% two days ago. But your competitors' good operators are watching their competitive sets and adjusting, and all things being equal the shopper leans toward the lower price. If you cannot break your inventory down this way, that is a problem worth solving before January. Here is why CarMax gave up $111 a car to sell 13.8% more, and what it says about your 61+ bucket.

What Does a 46.9-Day Buying Window Mean for Your Lead Follow-Up?

It means response time is table stakes and not the game. Every store has templates and a two-minute response time. Renaldo's point is that there is no intent in that response. Engaging a lead means asking the high-value questions: what specifically drew you to this vehicle, what have you seen on others that you liked better, what are you driving now? That last one matters because trades on leads at a new Lotpop dealer partner typically sit at 10% to 12%, and a manager calling about the customer's F-150 instead of the Tahoe they inquired on is a completely different conversation. John covered the “what are you driving now” ask and the trade capture gap last week.

John's framing: picture a networking breakout at a conference. Are you the person talking about yourself and your unit, or the person trying to learn everything about the other guy? Your customer sent 11 to 14 other leads. Speed got you in the door. Finding out about them is what earns the three hours. Two weeks ago we covered why your follow-up is still a template when the lead went to 14 other dealers.

The math behind it has not changed since John started in the business. More attempted contacts produce more contacts. More contacts produce more appointments. More appointments produce more shows. More shows produce more sales. It starts with attempted contacts, and half your active leads have not had one in three days.

Speed to lead gets you in the race. Finding out about the customer gets you the three hours.

This is vertical alignment: managing inventory and managing leads as one process instead of two departments. As a unit ages, the number of leads that have raised a hand on it goes up. The majority of lead activity in most stores sits on aged inventory. You had ample chances to match that car with a buyer, and every day it ages, the cost-to-market on that 98%-priced auction unit climbs toward the losing proposition Renaldo described. We've written about the 3-day contact gap on first-30 inventory before, and the pattern has not changed.

How Do You Find the Leads You Are Missing?

Run the funnel. This works on any CRM. I pulled one of that group's largest stores for the last 30 days:

Most managers see 85% contact and move on. My point is to look at what you did not get. Where are the 256 you never reached? What happened to the 785 you talked to but never set an appointment with? What about the roughly 397 who set an appointment and never showed? You cannot sell more cars until more opportunities show up, and you cannot coach what you have not measured. As Ed French told John and Renaldo years ago, the numbers that matter are the ones you missed.

Why Is Q4 the Time to Fix This?

Because you do not install a new game plan during the game. I called it training camp before tax season. Right now there is more inventory than customers, which means the small disciplines you skip when you are busy are exactly what you have time to build. John's advice: whatever you focus your attention on in the dealership gets lift. Pick one area, look at it from every angle, build the discipline, then move to the next one. If you have a big spring, it sets the tone for the year. If you do not, you are pushing a rock uphill until December.

The Bottom Line

Used car buyers spend about 47 days and nearly 15 hours shopping, and only three of those hours happen at the store that wins the deal. Half of your inventory has a live lead on it and half of those leads have gone three days without a human touching them, so the gap is not in your acquisition, your ad spend, or your response time. The auction works if you know your cost of ownership and your retail exit before you buy, and it fails when you own cars at 100% and price them at 98%. Reprice daily, run the CRM funnel every month, and coach to the customers you missed rather than the ones you got. Build those disciplines now, before tax season, and you push the rock off the ledge instead of up the mountain.

Want a coach to run the funnel and the contact gap on your store this week? Book a LotWalk demo.