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Case study · BC Kia · January through June, year over year

211 cars to 603 cars. Nobody worked a longer day.

No new hires. No extended hours. No change to the pay plan. We changed how leads got worked and how the numbers got watched, and the internet department nearly tripled.

+186%

Internet vehicles sold

+392

Additional cars delivered

11% → 16%

Lead close rate

2.7x

Faster to the sale

$1M+

Estimated gross impact

The situation

A good store with a leaky front door.

BC Kia was not a struggling rooftop. They were selling cars, they had a real team, and they had a CRM they were paying for every month. What they had was the problem almost every store has: a large pile of internet leads, a follow up process that lived in a few good people's heads, and no way to tell on a Tuesday whether the month was going to make it.

In the first half of 2025 they worked just under 2,000 leads and closed about 11 percent of them. Average time from lead to delivered car was six and a half days, which meant a meaningful share of customers bought somewhere else while the store was still deciding who owned the follow up.

What we changed

Four levers, pulled in this order.

  1. Fixed the CRM they already owned

    Statuses that meant the same thing to every manager, automations that fired correctly, and reporting a manager could run in under two minutes. Nothing new was purchased.

  2. Put video into the follow up

    After hours video, micro moment video, and post sale video built directly into the CRM templates. This turned out to be the single biggest lever, and the section below shows exactly how much.

  3. Installed a daily flow

    The first hours of every day belong to yesterday's unsold traffic. A written hot lead standard so nobody has to guess what urgent means.

  4. Made the numbers nightly

    Managers reviewing the board with the team every night instead of discovering the month on the 29th. This is the lever that keeps the other three from fading.

Same six months, one year apart

The full before and after.

Every row came out of the store's own CRM reporting, comparing January through June 2026 against January through June 2025. Measuring the same six months a year apart means seasonality is not doing the work for us.

BC Kia · internet department · Jan–Jun 2025 vs Jan–Jun 2026
Measure Jan–Jun 2025 Jan–Jun 2026 Change
Internet vehicles sold211603+186%
Leads actually worked1,9883,817+92%
Lead close rate11%16%+5 pts
Average days to sale6.52.42.7x faster

They did not double the leads and hope. They doubled the leads that got worked, and then converted more of them.

Durran walks through the BC Kia number. What actually moved, and what we would do differently.

The cleanest evidence we have

The same store ran its follow up two ways for 90 days.

This is the part we care about most, because it is close to a fair fight. Same reps, same CRM, same customer base, same quarter. The only meaningful difference between these rows is whether the follow up contained video.

Template performance · 90 days · same store
Template used Emails sent Click rate Sales appts set Cars sold
Post Sale Video video38232%1662
After Hours Video video74515%8361
Digital Third Party video60719%1717
No template used no video6350%199
Happy Birthday blast no video1,2630%03
The head to head

6.8x the cars

After Hours Video sent 745 emails and sold 61. No template at all sent 635 emails and sold 9. Nearly identical volume, same reps, same quarter.

The volume trap

1,263 emails, 3 cars

The highest volume template in the entire store was a birthday blast. It produced one click and three deliveries. Sending more is not the lever.

The sleeper

224 service appointments

382 thank you videos after delivery set 224 service appointments and contributed to 62 more cars. The GM recorded that video one time.

Every video template posted a double digit click rate. Every template without video posted roughly zero.

What we coach to

No mystery about the target.

These are the numbers we put on the board on day one of any engagement, so there is never an argument later about what good looks like.

100%

Every lead gets a video

80%

Contact rate

40%

Appointment set

30%

Appointment shown

20%

Sold

Not one store

It repeated. Three more rooftops, three brands.

One result is an anecdote. Here is the same method run at a Hyundai store, a Ford store, and a Hyundai group in another state. Every figure below is recomputed from the raw counts on the dealer's own reports.

Full year · 2023 vs 2024

Hyundai of Columbia

Columbia, Tennessee

  • Leads received10,642 →10,845 +2%
  • Cars sold838 →1,129 +35%
  • Appointments set933 →1,532 +64%
  • Avg days to sale10.6 →7.3 -3.3

Leads barely moved. Sales went up a third. This is the cleanest proof we have that the lever is how leads get worked, not how many arrive.

Full year · 2023 vs 2024

Ford of Columbia

Columbia, Tennessee

  • Leads received6,340 →7,108 +12%
  • Cars sold474 →588 +24%
  • Appointments shown269 →569 +112%
  • Avg days to sale15.2 →8.1 -7.1

Same method, different brand and different building. Time from lead to delivered car was cut nearly in half.

Jan–Apr · 2025 vs 2026

Hyundai dealership

Northeast Ohio · name withheld at the dealer's request

  • Total units sold1,151 →1,443 +25%
  • Appointments confirmed158 →446 +182%
  • Manual outbound calls34,575 →16,761 -52%
  • Used and CPO units762 →1,024 +34%

292 more cars on 17,814 fewer manual dials. If you only read one number on this page, read that one.

69 → 107

How fast it moves

In Columbia, online deliveries went from 69 to 107 in the first full month after the in-store launch. Not a quarter later. The first full month the new process was live.

The Ford and Hyundai of Columbia team holding up phones showing customer videos
The room that produced it. Ford and Hyundai of Columbia, every phone in the picture holding a customer video. This is what the process looks like when a floor actually adopts it.

Four rooftops. Three brands. Two states. The same process every time.

Read this part

How to check us.

Most firms in our category show you an aggregate you cannot verify. Billions in added revenue, thousands of dealerships trained. We would rather show you one store you can interrogate, and tell you where the number is soft.

What these numbers are, and what they are not

  • Every store here is one rooftop over one window. Four of them agreeing is a strong signal, not a controlled study. Each comparison uses matching calendar periods so seasonality is not doing the work, but a dealership is a moving target and other things changed in those periods too.
  • The CRM shares credit. When a customer who received a template later buys, the CRM attributes that sale to the template. Everything the store did contributed. The comparison between templates is still fair, because every row is attributed by the identical method.
  • We cite raw counts, not the percentages that break. A few of the store's report percentages exceed 100, because shown and completed counts include appointments set in an earlier period. We do not quote those. We quote emails sent, appointments set, and cars delivered.
  • The gross figure is an estimate. The 392 additional cars are counted. The million dollar impact is those cars multiplied by the store's own average gross, not an audited financial statement.
  • We recomputed every percentage ourselves. Some of these figures were first published by us with arithmetic errors in the percentage columns. We recalculated all of them from the raw counts before putting them here, and four of the corrections moved in the dealer's favour rather than ours. If a number here does not match something you saw earlier from us, this page is the corrected one.

Other floors

What people say after we leave.

Partnership, guidance, and friendship

Thank you Durran for your partnership, guidance, and friendship. The best is yet to come.
Patrick Robertson · then Assistant GM, Ford and Hyundai of Columbia

Witnessed the best year ever

I have found Durran to be extremely knowledgeable with any and all facets of the variable department. He especially excels in prospect follow up and all things digital. He develops and implements strategies to move each prospect to the next step.
Alan Vines · Dealer Principal

From 30 sales to 83

He has an asset which is hard to find these days and it is called passion. I would recommend Durran to any dealer group that is interested in his expertise.
J.R. Batchelor · Dealership

Cutting edge strategies

Durran is a goal oriented leader whose energetic approach inspires his team to move forward. He displays charisma and leadership traits naturally.
Michael Bailey · Internet Sales

Your turn

Give us one rooftop and 90 days.

We pick one number before we start, we work one list, and at the end you will know exactly what it did. If the number is not there, you will hear it from us before you hear it from your controller.

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