Your lead was not lost,it was left betweentwo people's jobs.

It is the set of rules a dealership runs so that every inquiry ends in one of four places: an appointment, a sale, lost with a written reason, or a follow-up date. Lead generation brings the inquiry in. Lead management decides who owns it, how fast and how well they reply, how long they keep trying and how it is closed out. Before a store buys more leads, it pays to check whether it is losing the ones it already gets somewhere between those steps.

It keeps one record per buyer, stamps the time each lead arrived, assigns it by your rules, reminds the owner when the next task is due and reports what happened by source. It cannot make the call or decide what to say. Treat it as the record, not the worker. If reminders are being dismissed with no attempt logged, a release rule and a weekly check are where to start, not more software.

There is no honest single number. It depends on how much floor traffic that person also handles, the hours they work and how much of the first reply is automated. Judge it from your CRM instead. When a salesperson's open leads keep passing the release window untouched, or sit for days with no logged activity, they have more than they can work. Move the overflow by a written rule, not by waiting for them to say so.

As many as you can measure and work properly, and no more. Each source needs a tag set at arrival and a row in your monthly grid, so you can see its cost per sold car. A source you cannot track cannot be judged. Before adding a provider, check that the leads you already pay for are being contacted, followed up and closed out with a reason. If they are not, a new source only adds volume to the leak.

Start with what you control. On your own website forms, ask for what helps the first conversation: the vehicle, a working phone number, whether there is a trade and when they hope to buy, and nothing that makes the form feel like a credit application. On bought leads, if the vendor's terms allow returns, return the dead numbers and fake names, and log each one against its source so the monthly grid shows it. A lead closed as bad with no reason tells you nothing about quality.

Because the conversation happens where the store cannot see it. A chat in a salesperson's personal Messenger is invisible to your CRM and to everyone else in the building, so nobody can follow up when that person is off or leaves. Wherever the conversation starts, have someone put it on a lead record the same day. What Meta supports for dealer inventory on Marketplace has changed, so read our Facebook Marketplace guide before you set up the route.

Some tools are built to work inside a dealership CRM and others run beside it, so test rather than trust the sales page. Send a test lead and open the lead record afterward: the replies, the timestamps and the moment a person took over should all be there. If someone has to copy the conversation in by hand, it depends on somebody remembering, which is the exact problem the tool was meant to remove.

Round robin gives each new lead to the next person on a list in turn, so the work spreads evenly and nobody picks only the easy ones. It only works if the list is today's schedule, not the full roster, or leads land on people who are off. Pair it with a release rule that moves a lead when its owner has not logged an attempt in time, and confirm your CRM can do this before you rely on it.