If you want to be successful in online automotive, and specifically in lead follow-up, then video can’t and shouldn’t be missing from your toolbox. Now, I’m well aware that some tools never get used, but this is one you really must and can use every single day, with every single lead!

It’s nothing new!

Video in lead follow-up was brought to the Netherlands more than 10 years ago by Ruud Prins with CitNOW Group. He was one of the pioneers in this field, and he did a great deal of missionary work to get dealers and salespeople to use this as a channel in customer contact. In lead follow-up, but also on the day before delivery, and of course it’s also highly relevant in aftersales, to be able to show a damaged brake disc and/or exhaust, for example. And all of that in a protected environment, something YouTube is not…

One of the most successful dealers back then was Motorhuis, who really wove video into their lead follow-up framework. Not as a nice to have, but as a must have! I believe they even won awards with it in the UK and, even better: it generated more sales!

CitNOW has all but disappeared and has now largely been displaced by a world-class Dutch player: VentaVid, run by Kees Oldenhage, who — like Rolf Westgeest and me — comes from the former SsangYong stable… Hmm, that can no longer be a coincidence…..

Use it every day!

At the Experience Store Doesburg we use Ventavid to the full, every day: to introduce ourselves, to follow up on the lead, to sell the trade-in appraisal, to schedule the delivery — in other words: for a great many things, video is reeeeeally relevant. And the nice thing is that you can see whether a video has been watched, and that does lead — especially in lead follow-up — to a higher conversion.

Now, I’m well aware that if you’re consistent in your lead follow-up, that higher conversion is the result — but you get lead follow-up on steroids when you use Ventavid daily. And that applies to every lead and every opportunity, because with video you truly deliver on the mission ‘online first, offline second’. By then it’s long stopped being about the car and much more about you as the salesperson and as the company. That’s what you need to sell. The lead — otherwise they wouldn’t have submitted anything — has reasonably already been sold on the car; now it’s your turn!