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I was recently in the market for a 2010 Honda Odyssey, fully loaded plus options.  My wife is expecting twins in February, and along with my 2-year old, we would soon outgrow our old vehicle.  The difficult decision to buy a (gulp!) mini-van was made; we settled on the Odyssey and figured out what options we wanted.  Being a member of the internet-savvy generation, I started by getting online price estimates from Autobytel.com and Edmunds.com and also researched what others were paying for the vehicle.  The only decision left was where to buy it.  I hope the next part will shock you into action...

I began by sending an email to twelve local Honda dealers, thinking I would find the one that offered me the lowest price and use that as a starting point for negotiations.  I was very surprised when only nine of the twelve dealers had valid email addresses listed on their website!  Even more shocking, of the nine dealers who got my message about buying a new car, only FOUR responded!  I replied to all four with a few clarifying questions, of which only three followed up.  I ended up purchasing my very expensive mini-van from one of those three dealers. 

It's amazing to me how quickly those three dealers increased their odds of making the sale from 1 in 12 to 1 in 3 by doing only the bare minimum of what is expected of any sales team.  Here I was, a prospect who had already done all his research, didn't need a test-drive, didn't need to discuss various options and features, and wasn't going to take a long time haggling over price - and 75% of the dealerships I contacted never even got a chance to make the sale.   The similarities between purchasing a car and leasing an apartment are many. 

Is your Sales team missing opportunities?  You should be able to complete these steps in 20 minutes or less to make sure you don't have cracks in your Internet Sales strategy:

1. Review every page of your website to ensure the contact information (phone and fax too!) is up to date and that none of your pages are broken.

2. Test any automated contact forms on your website to make sure they work properly.

3. Send a test email from your website to each listed email address and make sure they work properly.

4. Clearly define whose job it is within your organization to respond to emails and how often the email inbox should be checked.

5. Clearly define a follow-up strategy for all email/internet prospects.

6. Determine how you are going to audit your organization's adherence to Internet Sales procedures. This should include scheduled website testing from steps 1-3.

Don't let your competition get the jump on you just because they remember to answer their email!