Used car leads aren't converting when the shopper index drops because dealers are reacting to fewer at-bats by cutting prices instead of working the leads they already have. The spring shopper index typically drops 25–30% between graduation season and the start of summer selling — but in-market shoppers are still buying. The problem isn't the market. It's that managers are dropping prices on vehicles that already had hand-raisers at the original sticker, while leaving CRM leads sitting untouched for 7, 14, even 30 days.
This week on LotTalk, we dug into exactly where the margin is leaking, what "reading the lead" actually means in practice, and why the stores winning right now are the ones coaching the phones instead of reflexively cutting price.
Why Is the Spring Shopper Index Dropping Right Now?
It's not breaking news. It's the calendar.
Every year between mid-April and mid-June, the used car shopper index drops sharply. Tax refund money is spent. Graduation season pulls families out of the buying cycle for a few weeks. Summer selling season hasn't kicked in yet. This pattern has held for the last 15+ years, and by the time the country gets through July 4th, things stabilize and run clean into Q4.
So when you hear someone in your store say "the market's tough," push back. The market isn't tough. The market is transitioning — and that's a different problem with a different solution.
Here's what changed: in February, March, and the first week or two of April, customers were coming to you. They were spending tax money. They felt FOMO. They walked onto the lot, sent leads, and pushed deals across the finish line on their own. Now? The action has to come from you. That's the whole shift.
Are You Cutting Prices on Cars That Already Had Buyers?
This is where most stores are bleeding gross right now.
Picture this: a car comes in priced at $30,000. Two weeks ago a customer sent a lead on it at $30,000. The salesperson made one or two attempts, didn't get a callback, and moved on. The car sits. Seven weeks later, it's still in stock. The manager looks at the report, says "this car isn't moving," and drops the price by $2,500.
Now ask yourself: did the customer at $30,000 disappear because the price was too high? No. The customer disappeared because nobody followed up with them.
"You just had somebody raise their hand on a vehicle at $30,000 two weeks ago. And you've now discounted it at $28 grand. Do you really need to discount it?" — Chris Keene
If a customer sends in a lead at the asking price, they are signaling two things at once: the vehicle is in their budget, and they want a conversation. They are not asking you to drop $2,500. They are asking you to call them back.
When you change the price before exhausting your follow-up, you're not solving a market problem. You're solving a process problem with a margin gift.
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What Does "Reading the Lead" Actually Mean?
This is one of those fundamentals that sounds simple and gets ignored daily. "Reading the lead" means studying the lead as a piece of customer intelligence — not just an alert in the CRM. It has two layers:
1. What is the customer actually asking? A Capital One pre-qualification lead is a customer asking about financing. If your auto-responder and your salesperson both come back with "What time can you be here this afternoon?" — you didn't read the lead. You ignored it. The customer asked one question; you answered a different one.
2. When did the lead come in? If the lead arrived at 5:30 PM, that's likely when the customer is actually available to talk. Sending your follow-up calls at 8:30 AM the next morning means you're calling them while they're at work or commuting. Match your outreach to the customer's pattern. If a lead comes in at 2:30 AM, that customer probably works nights — and your 10 AM call is going to voicemail every single time.
"Reading the lead means: what questions did the customer ask us, are we getting them answered, and are we reaching back out at the time they reached out?" — John Anderson
What Is a Switch Opportunity and Why Does It Matter Right Now?
A switch opportunity is a lead on a vehicle similar to one already in your inventory — a customer who raised their hand on a comparable car at another store, or on a unit you used to have but don't anymore. Switch leads are some of the highest-intent opportunities in your CRM because the customer has already self-identified as in-market for that exact body style, price band, and configuration.
In a slower market, switch leads matter more, not less. Renaldo described a recent dealer call where the dealer complained about not having any leads on a vehicle. The team pulled the report and the truck had 13 switch opportunities sitting in the CRM. Untouched. The dealer didn't know switch leads could be worked that way. That's not a market problem. That's a training and process problem.
When you have fewer overall at-bats, switch opportunities become the highest-leverage list in the building.
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Why Are Managers Wearing Too Many Hats to Coach the Phones?
Here's a hard truth: most sales managers and used car directors are wearing too many hats. They're appraising trades, talking to lenders, submitting deals, walking the trade row, doing one-on-ones, sitting in service write-up, T.O.'ing deals, and managing aging inventory all in the same eight hours.
So when a salesperson sends out a weak response to a Capital One lead, the manager doesn't catch it. Or worse — the manager sees it and yells about it instead of coaching it.
"I'll get a little ass sideways with the manager that just wants to stand up there at the ivory tower and tell them how to do it and never show them. Never coach them. Therein lies a lot of the problem." — Chris Keene
If the average salesperson doesn't know how to handle a financing-first lead, that's not their failure — that's a coaching gap. The fix isn't a meeting. The fix is the manager picking up the phone with the rep at their desk and modeling the call live. Once. Twice. As many times as it takes for confidence to show up.
If your store is "less busy" right now, you have time to coach. So coach.
What Should You Be Measuring Instead of Open Tasks?
Stop looking at the CRM like a to-do list and start looking at it like a scoreboard.
Most managers run their CRM check by counting open tasks and overdue tasks. That tells you whether tasks got checked off. It does not tell you whether real work happened.
The metric that matters: activities per opportunity.
How many times has a real human attempted real contact — call, text, email — on each individual opportunity? Not "did the system mark it complete." Not "did the auto-responder fire." How many real touches?
If you found out a salesperson on the showroom floor walked away from a customer on a Tahoe because "he said he wasn't buying today," you'd lose your mind. You'd damn near fire them. Now bring that same standard to the virtual lot, where you're getting exponentially more opportunities than walk-ins.
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What Does Process Obsession Look Like in a Dealership?
This is where the football analogy lands.
Nick Saban won seven national championships and never once talked about winning a national championship. He talked about the process. Curt Cignetti — coming off that same coaching tree at Indiana — runs the same playbook. Alabama's Ty Simpson said it after IU lined up against them: "They did the same thing every play. They never made a mistake."
Renaldo's read on it was sharper: "They were difficult to figure out, but they were impossible to stop. You knew what was coming."
That's the dealership playbook in a softer market. It's not trick plays. It's not a new vendor. It's:
- Read every lead. Understand what question the customer asked and when they asked it.
- Match outreach timing to lead timing. Call at the same time they reached out.
- Ask the customer how and when they want to be contacted.
- Work switch opportunities like they're walk-ins.
- Coach the phones — don't yell about them.
- Refresh merchandising before you change price. Check your photos, descriptions, and VDP conversion.
- Measure activities per opportunity, not open tasks.
- Manager T.O. on every deal — virtual and physical.
Run that every day. Every week. Every month. The wins compound.
The Bottom Line
The spring shopper index dip is real, predictable, and not a market problem — it's a transition. When fewer customers are walking in, fewer mistakes are forgivable. The dealers crushing it right now aren't lucky and they aren't in better markets. They're working the leads they already have, coaching the phones, reading every opportunity, and refusing to compress their own margins by reflex-pricing cars that already had buyers.
Less at-bats doesn't mean less business. It means every at-bat counts more. Obsess over the process and the scoreboard takes care of itself.
If you want a coach walking your lot every week and holding your team to the standard, get an estimate or book a demo — we'll show you exactly where the margin is leaking and how to plug it.
Chris Keene: Just because there we have downshifted and the shopper index has done its atypical seasonal drop. This does not mean end of the earth.
Renaldo Leonard: Man, I missed—
Chris Keene: Well, here are folks. We are back. We are back. We are back. You have tuned back into LotTalk powered by LotPop. I'm Chris Keene, one of the co-hosts as always the infamous, the curmudgeon himself, Mr. John Anderson. And he takes that with absolute love because he knows we meet it with love. And we've got back fresh off of a vacation, but still needing a vacation because he had two one-year-olds under the roof with them in the family vacation. Mr. Renaldo Leonard, glad to have you back, my brother.
Renaldo Leonard: Hey, my man, it's good to be here. Good to be here for sure.
John Anderson: I always said that Ronaldo when I come back from vacation, I got, I need a vacation from vacation. Right. Cause you typically just when you're on vacation, you're rocking and rolling, man. But you were really rocking and rolling with two one-year-olds brother.
Renaldo Leonard: Dude, let me tell you. Yeah, I've been removed from that stage of life in young ones. And it was a brilliant reminder that you got to teach them everything, right? Yes, indeed. But yeah, man, was good stuff for sure.
Chris Keene: Well, you know, that's definitely a great segue into today. And this is where I would actually sit there and tell our dealers in listeners, viewers, salespeople, dealer principals, C-suite, GMs owners, whoever's on this call today, whoever's listening to this podcast. Patience is one thing I would definitely tell you guys you need to have with our market taking a shift. Now hear me very close. Just because there we have downshifted and the shopper index has done its atypical seasonal drop. This does not mean end of the earth. So this is not a negative light. All it's telling you is there's less at bats. So that patience that I'm talking about — have patience because like every year for the last 15 years or more, you could go back and you could watch the trend. There's that decline in shopper index. And then as soon as we get through graduations, which you guys all know, it's going to happen next month. As soon as we get through that, we get into the summer selling season that we have stability all the way into Q4.
So we really need to have a little bit of patience here, but yet use this opportunity to not let your CRM lie to you, to use this opportunity to go back and really evaluate the way that we are incentivizing our people. Is it conducive to business? And really important guys go look now. At all the big OEMs — Ford, General Motors, Stellantis, Hyundai, Kia, Toyota, Honda, Nissan. Go look at them, because when you've got things out there like 72 months, 3.9% financing on that 72 months and $3,500 consumer cash on a Ram 1500 BigHorn. Do you think that might have reset the values of these late model ones that we bought 45, 60 days ago when we didn't have those incentives?
I mean, look at it now, guys. I've jumped on and had some conversation with some dealers and looking at some of this late model inventory going, hey, you wonder why you ain't getting no activity on it. Have you looked at what's happening on your new car side? I mean, there's a problem. So take note of that. Take note of you're getting opportunities. You have less at bats, but the opportunities you got are really strong in-market shoppers ready to say yes if you meet them where they're at. If you actually pick up the phone and call them back with something tangible outside of "you still in the market? Can you be by this afternoon or this evening?"
John Anderson: I don't even know where to start. You said something earlier Chris, you're not wrong, but I want to put a little bit different face on it. And it'll bleed into what we're talking about. You just asked me a question about, I don't know that there are some dealers I wouldn't necessarily say have less at bats. I would say as a market, yes, the shopper index has dropped by close to 30%. So there are less in-market shoppers. Now what I've seen — in-market shoppers are still buying cars. I mean, they're active, definitely. But there's just less of them. Right?
So when you have less in-market shoppers and the amount of inventory you have, then people, there's no FOMO, there's no fear of missing out. So people slow down, customers slow down their buying process and they shop more. I had a manager training and I get on with this young man — he wasn't young, but cool guy, man — really enjoyed talking to him and we started digging into the data and I'm seeing all these opportunities that they have as a store with customers who have reached out on their inventory and they're just not talking to their customers and they're still changing prices on the regular.
And so yeah, I stopped it. I mean, the first thing you need to go back and do, if you want to have a true immediate effect on your store, is go back and talk to the powers that be. And you guys need to come up with a process and get your team engaged in talking to your customers. Because what are we doing guys? If you looked out on your lot this morning, you had a hundred customers standing on your lot or in your showroom — you're going to scramble to do everything you can to make sure each one of those customers gets met, greeted and talked to. It's going to be that important to you. And my point is I don't understand why it's not as important on our virtual lot. It should be because that's how they end up on your physical lot.
There's two things that I continue to see. We continue to change prices on our inventory even when we have customers on the inventory. And I'm just seeing teams that aren't talking to their customers. It hasn't shifted. Here we are almost into May and towards the end of June, summer selling season will start to kick in for July and August. But that's still two months away, that's 60 days. And I'm just seeing 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 days on customers that are sitting on inventory that's still in stock that they sent the lead in on and we're not talking to them.
Chris Keene: Unfortunately, sometimes it's okay to sit there and go, hey, here's the white flag. I'm going to wave it. And what am I missing? Listeners and viewers, I don't care who you reach out to — reach out to us, reach out to whoever your mentors are. Take a vantage point and view from your frontline team, but somebody got to wave a flag and say time out. You know, our business is off or our margins — we're not making what we were making before.
You just heard John talking about it. We've seen it a million times over. We keep discounting prices on vehicles when you've had activity on them $500, $1,000, $1,500, $2,000 ago. More times than not, we're seeing dealers compress their own margins and they think, well, because the market has slowed down, we're going to compress the margin. Do you? I mean, you just had somebody raise their hand on a vehicle at $30,000 two weeks ago. And you've now discounted it at $28 grand. I mean, do you really need to discount it? Because those people you had raising their hand on the vehicle at $30 grand — if you're not measuring the amount of activity per opportunity, then you're missing the boat. If you are not picking up the phone, call, text, email, your customer with quality followup — not just quantity, but with quality — then you deserve to get your margins cut.
John Anderson: Hey, can I ask you guys a question? Do you guys feel like if a customer, let's say you got a car priced at $35 grand and a customer sends you a lead at $35 grand — do you feel like they're telling you that they're okay with the price? Are they giving you, are they kind of telling you that yeah, I'm okay with the price. I'm willing to give you my information because I'm interested in the vehicle?
Chris Keene: I'm going to put it in two different perspectives. When it comes to shoes, you guys know I like shoes and boots. I am not going to go search for a $1,000 pair of boots. Because that's out of my price range. I'm not going to go shop for a million dollar home because it's out of my price range. So to answer your question, John — is somebody searching for a $35,000 car? It's because that's their budget. They're not going to search for something that is outside their budget. That's not to say that the lending institution ain't going to come back and say, whoa bud, you don't qualify for that, your DTI is out of line and you need to be at $30 grand. That's a different story. But as the consumer to darken your doorstep, and if they raise their hand on $35 grand, it's because that's in their budget.
Renaldo Leonard: Yeah, no, I'm right there with you. The majority of the time, somebody sends in a lead on a vehicle, it's in the price range or it's within what they feel like their monthly budget could sustain. I think they're signifying two things. It's in my price range and I would like to talk to somebody about moving forward with it. And from there the ball's in your court.
We're talking about shopper counts being down and I had a chicken little situation a little earlier. "Well, shopper counts are down. So we're not going to sell as many vehicles." I was like, you know, I always like to see situations like this because I can equate it to that Saturday — end of the month, last Saturday of the month, you got everything lined up. But then it starts raining and it's coming down. And everybody's walking around, they got the Milly Mouth face on. "Oh man, it's raining. We ain't gonna sell anything today." I'm like, no, I love to see rainy days because it cuts out the riffraff. People that come out on a rainy day, what are they doing? They're buying. Same situation now.
John Anderson: I just see it in our software because we track when the car came in and the original price, right. And when the lead came in on that vehicle at that price. And then here you are seven weeks later, the car hasn't sold yet, the lead hasn't been talked to, but maybe we've contacted them two or three times in the seven weeks. And in the meantime, we've taken the car and dropped the price by $2,500. And that's what I'm talking about. I'm just trying to grasp why we still do that.
Now as our software has evolved and we brought in the lead data — that was the epiphany that Jason had when he brought in the lead data. We were looking at these cars that are sitting in inventory and we're addressing these cars week after week on meetings. And if it was a vAuto VIN dealer, we're seeing a lead bubble with leads on it. But the car's not selling and we're changing the price and the car's still not selling. And then Jason brought in the lead data and it was like, holy crap. Here's why the car's not selling. We're not talking to our customer.
Renaldo Leonard: "Why don't I have any leads?" We take a look at it, you got 13 switch opportunities on a vehicle. You don't have any leads? "Well, I didn't know you could work it that way." Okay. Yeah, you can work it that way. Just look at the vehicle, see how many opportunities you have, attack those opportunities. Talk to your customers. Does it require some work? Of course. But that's the reason why the majority of people aren't doing it.
John Anderson: That was the point I was getting at. We're not really less busy. Now the action has to come from us. Earlier, the action was coming from the customer — they're picking up the phone, they're calling, they're coming into the store. Now for the most part, that's transitioned. Now that transition has to happen with us and our team, and now we've got to dig and start doing all these little things.
Renaldo Leonard: I would argue, John, that everything we do at the physical lot is reactive. And the things that we handle with the digital lot are a little more proactive. When we started this, we started out first episode, it's no longer shooting fish in a barrel. We're coming off of the high of COVID. Everybody's just walking in and begging to buy vehicles. And we had to get back to the basics. And I see February, March, beginning of April as being that COVID hot. And when those shopper counts start to come down, we've got to get back to those basic fundamentals that drive activity and drive the results we're looking for. It's just a smaller window of time, but it's the same process. And it's like Groundhog Day. There is nothing new that's happened in the car business in the last 20 years. Absolutely nothing new.
Chris Keene: We should be equally as busy when we're seeing the amount of opportunities that haven't fallen away from dealerships. Immediately I go in and I look and I'm like, well, I don't know how your business slowed down. Maybe the amount of sales you've had, yeah, that's what I'm talking about. But you're still getting the same amount of opportunities. Matter of fact, your opportunities have gone up. And your opportunities on cars that you still have in stock has gone up.
All of that to say — when your team is saying "but we're calling our customers" — stop looking at the amount of opportunities. Let me put it in the language of the CRM. We don't have a bunch of open tasks. We don't have a bunch of overdue tasks. Stop looking at it like that. Start looking at and measuring your activities per opportunity. There's the start.
If you had a hundred customers standing on your lot, you're going to hit on all eight cylinders and you're absolutely going to lose your ever loving mind if Five Car Fred lot drops a customer and you look up and go, "where's that customer you had on that Tahoe?" "Well, he said he ain't buying today." You would lose your ever loving mind and damn near fire good old Five Car Fred for letting that customer leave out of there without a T.O. Well, have that same intensity on the virtual lot, where you're getting exponentially more opportunities.
When was the last time that you actually picked up the phone and worked with one of your salespeople to show them what a phone call should look like? I do not begrudge any salesperson or BDC rep. But I will get a little ass sideways with the manager that just wants to stand up there at the ivory tower and tell them how to do it and never show them. Never coach them. Because therein lies a lot of the problem.
The example was this — it was a Capital One lead. And the response from the auto responder and the human response was, "Got your pre-qualification. What's a good time to come down to go through your pre-qualification?" I said to the GSM, "That's a Capital One lead, right? The customer sends a lead in to talk about financing, but you want to start talking about the vehicle and an appointment. Did you ever answer their question?" He goes, "Well, I guess not." And you're sitting here yelling at your salespeople to go do it. Did you ask yourself the question if they know how to do it? If they know how to respond to somebody inquiring about financing?
For any salesperson or BDC rep listening to this — it is not expected, at least from us, that you are qualified to have a finance and insurance conversation with them. But for the GSMs and the GMs and the sales managers and the owners — if you're creating an expectation for them to do something that they're not trained to do, shame on you.
Renaldo Leonard: There has to be a level of confidence involved in order for there to be success. If a salesperson has the amount of confidence that all I need to do is ask them to come down and we can have every conversation that we need to in order to get them in a vehicle that they can afford — it's an open invitation. It's just a conversation. If salespeople don't feel comfortable with picking up that phone, because they don't know what they're going to say, they don't know how it's going to go, they're not prepared for it — they have zero confidence in it.
You gotta spend the time equipping them with tools to handle and feel confident in every situation.
When did it become a problem to ask someone when they would like to be contacted? Or how they would like to be contacted?
John Anderson: That's a great point. Just think about that for a second. How easy is that? And also let me flip that on the other side. How much do you set yourself apart by asking that question? Cause how often are they hearing that?
Chris Keene: They're not. All they're hearing is, "Yes, this is in stock. What time can you be here this morning or afternoon?"
Renaldo Leonard: And from what the data is telling us about the number of leads that they may have submitted to other dealerships on other vehicles — how many times are they going to hear, "Hi, my name is Renaldo. I'll be here to assist you on your journey with finding your new vehicle. First thing I want to know, how often would you like for me to contact you? And next, what medium would you like for me to use? You prefer phone call, text message, or an email. It's my goal in life to make this process as easy as possible. And if I do something that you don't agree with, you do me a favor and please tell me." Done and done.
John Anderson: You know, I was getting at earlier — are we less busy? We're really not. Chris, you said something that stuck with me about reading the lead. Reading the lead also means — yeah, what questions did the customer ask us and are we getting them answered and are we having quality conversation with the customer? But another important thing — are we reading a lead from the perspective of when did the customer send us that lead? Did they send us that lead at 5:30 in the afternoon? And then since then we're not getting any contact from them and we're sending all our responses back at 8:30 or 9 o'clock in the morning.
If you get a lead in at 2:30 in the morning, chances are you got a guy that works nights or is up. So I've got to study a little bit harder, read the lead. When did they reach out to you? And am I reaching back out to them in a similar time?
These are all these small things that are tedious. They are tedious things. But when now maybe your store's less busy — that's when you do those things. What happens when you stop being active? Not being physically active leads to sedentary lifestyle. Weakened muscles, reduced metabolism, weight gain. And weight gain would be aged inventory. We become sedentary and we're not doing the little things that amount to big things, which is consistency month in and month out.
We have some dealers doing it and we could show it time and time again. And the one thing you see is the consistency never changes. It's like clockwork. They're working inventory — they're not always changing prices. They're looking at merchandising. They're changing their photo arrangement. They're changing descriptions because as Chris says, those Google spiders recognize that we get better relevancy by changing things up. So that's a way for us to get our inventory in front of more people online. We don't necessarily have to change the price.
Chris Keene: And John, this is a point — I don't want us to miss this. Across the nation, everything's starting to bloom. Weather's started to get better. If you are not going in looking at your pictures to make sure there ain't a bunch of dead trees in the background and two foot of snow, and a thermometer showing that it's 17 degrees outside — you're missing the boat.
John Anderson: 100% and it's all that stuff. Man, I hope it comes across — we do this because we want you guys to have massive success. Our industry is great, man. Without our industry, this country would be in massive trouble. Just drive down the road and all you gotta do is drive around Dallas one trip and see how many people are driving cars. Everybody has to have transportation.
The stuff we're talking about is really not that difficult. It's just having a process and adhering to the process and making sure that day in and day out, this is what I'm doing. The most successful sports teams — it's not about the trick plays. It's about the consistency they have within their work ethic, their coaching, their players, and how that's put out on the field. It's process management on the field.
I'm an IU fan and I saw the response from the quarterback at Alabama saying, well, Indiana didn't really — they did the same, they lined up and did the same thing on every play. So they weren't that difficult to figure out, but they never made a mistake. They did it every play. They never cracked.
Renaldo Leonard: They were difficult to figure out, but they were impossible to stop. You knew what was coming.
John Anderson: So that's what we're talking about right there, man. It's just being — not accepting anything but: this is our process and this is what we're going to adhere to. And I'm talking about everybody. Please, please, please stop saying "I can't get my team to do that." Please stop saying that.
Chris Keene: You know, with Renaldo's reference to how we look at everything from a football mindset — the three of us were football guys. John, with your reference you just talking about Ty Simpson and how Indiana didn't do anything special, they just did the same thing every time and they just got really good at it. Leads me to close with this.
The biggest takeaway from today: look at the amount of activity that you are having with each and every last one of your opportunities and make sure that we are getting all hands on deck working the opportunities we got. You're working with these customers to meet the lead where they're at. That's the biggest takeaway.
But to the reference of football — Nick Saban, arguably who was the best college football coach, at least of our era. He never focused on the end goal of being a national championship. He went into every spring training. He went into every week focused on nothing but the process. And guys like Cignetti from IU come kind of off of that tree of Nick Saban. But they focused on the process. What did Nick Saban follow through with each and every year he coached? The process. The bottom line is this — they won a lot. Why? Because they obsessed over the process.
And we encourage that you do the same thing. Obsess over the process. If you obsess over the process, you don't have to worry about winning the national championship because you're just going to win, period. The harder we work and obsess over the process, the more you will continue to win.
So with that being said, on behalf of Mr. Anderson, Mr. Leonard, and everybody from the family here at LotPop, we wish you nothing but success, and we ask that you continue to tune in, subscribe, and like to LotTalk, powered by LotPop. I'm Chris Keene, and we are out.