I bought my first dealership in 1981.
I knew cars. I knew the business. I had spent years learning the variable ops side, the F&I office, the service drive. I understood grosses, turn rates, absorption, and market conditions.
What I did not understand, not really, not until it cost me, was the phone.
What I Got Wrong in the Early Years
In the early years, I treated the phone the way most dealer principals treat it today. It was infrastructure. It was there. Calls came in, people answered them, deals happened or they did not. I had no visibility into what was happening on those calls and honestly did not think I needed any.
I was measuring the outcomes I could see. Showroom traffic. Units sold. Gross per copy. Service absorption. Those were the numbers on my desk every morning. What I was not measuring was everything that happened before a customer walked through the door, or decided not to.
The first time I really understood what I was missing, I had a rough month. My GM and I went looking for answers in the usual places. Marketing spend. Inventory mix. Pricing. Everything looked reasonable. Then someone suggested we actually listen to our incoming calls. What we heard changed how I ran every dealership I owned from that point forward.
What Was Happening on Our Phones
The calls were being answered. That much was true. But answered and handled well turned out to be two completely different things.
We had salespeople putting customers on hold for four and five minutes, then coming back to a dead line. We had service advisors giving vague availability responses instead of specific appointment times. We had BDC reps who were great at volume but losing the appointment on the close every single time.
That month I estimated we had lost somewhere between 20 and 30 deals to poor phone handling alone. Not to pricing. Not to inventory. Not to a competitor’s promotion. To how our team answered and managed calls. It had been happening for years before we ever looked at it.
The Conversation That Changed the Industry
Years later, I served on the board of the largest DMS provider in the automotive industry.
In those board meetings, we talked about every technology a dealership runs. Inventory management. F&I desking. Service scheduling. CRM. I kept raising the same point: the one technology a dealership absolutely cannot live without is the phone. Every other system in the building depends on a customer deciding to engage. The phone is where that decision happens first.
The response was not enthusiastic. The DMS world was not in the phone business. It was not their focus.
I pushed. I made the case. I showed the numbers. And eventually, somewhat begrudgingly, they got into the phone business.
They are still in it today.
That experience told me something important: even the most sophisticated technology companies in automotive retail had underestimated the phone. If the largest DMS provider needed convincing, it was not hard to understand why individual dealer principals were still treating their phone system as an afterthought.
The Lessons That Changed How I Operated
You cannot manage what you cannot measure. The dealers who told me their phones were fine were the dealers who had never actually audited their call performance. The moment you put a number on it, conversion rate, appointment set rate, hold time, transfer completion rate, you stop guessing and start managing.
The phone is a revenue channel, not a utility. Every inbound call is a gross profit opportunity. Every outbound call is a relationship in progress. When you start treating the phone with the same rigor you apply to your internet leads or your showroom traffic, everything changes.
Your best people are not always your best phone performers. The phone is a specific skill. It requires specific coaching. And you cannot coach it without call data.
The service department is where the relationship lives or dies. Service is your highest-margin department and your most consistent customer touchpoint. I lost customers I never knew I had because of mishandled service calls.
Speed of response matters more than almost anything else. The customer who calls and gets answered quickly, gets their question answered completely, and gets a specific next step has a dramatically higher probability of converting than the customer who gets put on hold, transferred twice, and promised a callback that comes two hours later.
What I Would Tell My 1981 Self
Your phone is your first impression, your follow-up system, your service retention tool, and your revenue recovery mechanism, all at once. Treat it accordingly.
Audit your calls. Measure your outcomes. Coach your people on real recordings, not role play scripts. Know your after-hours miss rate. Know your transfer completion rate. Know your service appointment set rate and your show rate.
And demand that any vendor you bring in can show you, in real numbers specific to your store, exactly what their solution is worth to your gross profit before you sign anything.
I did not know to ask for that in 1981. By the time I left the dealer chair, it was the first question I asked.
Where dealerTEL Comes From
dealerTEL exists because of everything I learned in those 30 years and the decade I spent in automotive telecom afterward. I convinced the largest DMS provider in the industry to get into the phone business because I had seen firsthand what the phone was worth to a dealership’s gross profit and what it cost when it was ignored.
Every dealer I work with today gets the same thing I wish I had from day one: complete visibility into their phone performance, a real dollar figure on what they are currently losing, and a clear path to recovering it.
It starts with a complimentary telecom audit. No obligation, no contract, no disruption to your current operation. Just the data. And then a conversation from someone who has sat in your chair.
Thirty years taught me that the phone is where gross profit is made or lost before it ever reaches your showroom floor. Let me show you what yours is telling you.
