#54 - MM - Best Lead Is Under Your Finger Tips
28 Jan 2026 · 3 min
A short podcast conversation (Luke and another speaker) arguing that dealerships should prioritize existing customers over buying new third-party leads. They cite high customer lifetime value (example: $250,000 lifetime revenue cited for a franchise dealership), recommend using CRM to increase service, repeat sales, referrals, and close rates, and criticize reliance on portals like CarGurus and Cars.com.
Chapters
Hey Luke, what's going on man? Happy Monday to you. What, what do you got going on this? I've been thinking about our lifetime value of a customer, the LT customer, man. I mean are we just looking our current customers? We're so busy trying to go out and prospect for new ones that we're not really eating the ones we already have for sure.
And unfortunately that's just kind of the way we are. You know I remember sitting in it was either my CMD class or 20 group with Joe Lascota and he, this was before, you know, it was, is really I guess the norm to turn cars as fast as you could. And he was, he was talking about, well you just need to go ahead and sell that car even if you're not making a lot of money. Because I think in and these were figures from a franchise dealership but he was saying that that customer is worth $250,000 in revenue over the life of that customer, which is huge. Right. So we have such great information on the customers we currently have. Why are we so ready to buy a new customer which is, it's just mind boggling to me.
Yeah, they didn't, you know, you cost to acquire that customer in the first place and hopefully you're building a relationship then not only are they going to buy cars, their families are going to buy from you, they're going to come back to you for service, service center. They're going to, you know, talk you up to their friends and neighbors. So why aren't we spending that money more? It's kind of on our customer base instead of the car gurus and cars.com and every ties into the sun for sure.
And that's what we need to be doing. We need to look at our CRM, we need to look at everything we do to make sure we're, we're mounting our customer base and we're just focusing on that. Not more leads. More leads is a dangerous way to go. You've got enough leads right now, you need to close them better and you need to take the people you already closed who know how you do business and sell them more and get them to refer more. That's where it's at. It's not in these third party companies.
Referrals, referrals, referrals. I think that's, it's a huge thing that we don't put enough emphasis on. I'm going to look at it this week, I'm going to harp on it again with my guys and focus, you know, double down what a low hanging fruit.
For sure. We need. We need to make sure we take care of our customers and we need to make sure we sell our customers more products. That's it?
That's it. Awesome. Luke. Have a great week, man. We'll talk to you on Thursday.
See you later.