How Devvo Turns Dormant Leads Into an Extra 85 Car Sales a Month
“Nobody wants to be looked at as a number. These are people making what used to be the second biggest decision of their lives. For some of them, it is the biggest.”
There was an Audi A4 on the lot in an unusual brown. More than 90 days old, the kind of car that earns a nickname. Christopher Meneses was a salesperson at the time, and while everyone else worked their own stack of printed leads to see if they could shift the car, he asked a different question: How many people had walked into this dealership over the years and asked about an Audi?
600, it turned out, sitting in a Close account he was paying for out of his own pocket because he was tired of printing leads. He sent one email. The car sold that day. Total time: 30 minutes.
"There's no feeling like it. You're like, wow, three clicks," he says.
That instinct is now a company, Devvo. Devvo is an outsourced business development center that works leads and books appointments for dealerships. The best part is that Devvo fills a real need for these dealerships: The work no commissioned salesperson has time to do. His team of 15+ works databases nobody else touches and sells 85 cars a month out of them.
He does this by working dormant leads the dealerships have all but given up on. It takes about 59 touch points to turn a long-cold record into someone driving off the lot, sometimes spread over two or three years. No commissioned salesperson is doing that.
Your salespeople are on the lot. They're showing families cars. They're going on test drives. They have no time to be cold calling and prospecting.
— Christopher Meneses, Founder at Devvo
To make that model work at scale, Christopher needed a CRM built for sales activity. Dealership systems were built for accountants, not the teams that sell them. It prioritized the inventory over the sales team's ease of use, so getting the right tool for the job is critical to increasing sales.
Check out the whole conversation here:
A CRM Salespeople Will Actually Use
As a sales rep himself, Christopher knew the tools provided at the dealership weren’t working, so he set out to find a solution that could call, text, and keep the record in one place. He found all that and more with Close. Three months later he was the top salesperson at the dealership.
"Not because I was the best or the most knowledgeable," he says. "I was just leveraging the right tools."
Once Christopher moved from using Close himself to rolling it out across entire sales floors, adoption became the real test. Devvo needed a CRM salespeople would actually use, with calling, SMS, and email in one place and enough flexibility to fit each dealership’s workflow.
As you know, good closers are horrible in CRMs. The better they are at closing, the harder it is for them to leave notes, to use the system. A lot of them call from their personal phone number.
— Christopher Meneses, Founder at Devvo
The Part Everyone Worries About: Migrations
Christopher does not pretend a CRM change is nothing. "Whenever you switch CRMs, it's like having a heart transplant," he says. So before he configures anything at a new dealership, he sits with the owner, the managers, and the newest salesperson on the floor.
"Dealerships are like little cities. It's not a one size fits all," he says. Supporting the team can look very different depending on their preferences. Some general managers want live transfers. Some want appointments landing on a calendar. Some want leads assigned with a task waiting in an inbox. He builds to support the team's current workflow, because the fear at every dealership is the same: The reps won't use the new thing. But Christopher has found the opposite.
I've never worked with any other system that has a better ease of use in adoption. For some reason, everybody loves Close.
— Christopher Meneses, Founder at Devvo
Before outreach begins, Devvo confirms that every lead has opted in to calls or texts.
How Devvo Works Dormant Leads
Christopher has a blueprint for dormant leads, and it runs on more than 100 automations across Close and Zapier, wired into whatever else the dealership already uses.
1. Keep leads warm. Devvo sends 2,000 to 3,000 emails a day, plus text campaigns, so a dealership stays in front of people who asked about a car months or years ago. This gives customers something to react to
2. Watch for the trigger. Workflows watch for a signal like five email opens or a link click, then change that lead's status to be worked in a Smart View.
3. Work the dial block. A Power Dialer works down the SDR's list without anyone touching a keypad, voicemail drops for the calls that don't connect, and a recording, transcript, and outcome logged on every one.
"One SDR is cranking out 4,000 calls a month, and [dealership sales reps] are doing like a third of that, because they can only click and wait," Christopher says of even well-run in-house teams.
And the newest play: Close's Voice Agent.
About 40 percent of car leads arrive when the dealership is closed, so Devvo hands nights and weekends to the voice agent in Close. Close’s voice agent calls right away, asks the questions that tell the team how to serve this person when they walk onto the lot, and logs the conversation on the record. The industry calls it taking the customer off the market: They've had a real conversation with somebody, so they stop shopping around.
The buyer never has to start over, and the salesperson never has to guess.
The Result: 20-30% AVG Revenue Lift from Dormant Leads
Devvo averages 85 car sales a month just from dormant leads. And across the entire account, the dealerships typically see a 20 to 30 percent revenue increase. After about six months, Devvo is responsible for roughly 40 percent of a dealership's total deals.
But the human result is the one Christopher makes sure his team is reminded of everyday.
Nobody wants to be looked at as a number. These are people making the second biggest decision of their lives. For some of them it's the biggest… It could be your call number 100, but for them it's that one call that could change how they drive to work for the next few years. And they put their kids in that car.
— Christopher Meneses, Founder at Devvo
And when it comes to defining success, Christopher’s proudest of being able to share his success with his team.
As a measure of success, it's never really what you have. It's the impact that you make. I could win the lottery tomorrow and I'll still do this.
— Christopher Meneses, Founder at Devvo
You already paid for those leads once. Work them.
If you're running sales for a dealership group, or you're the agency doing the follow-up they can't staff, the database is already yours. Start a free trial of Close and go find the dormant leads who are ready to buy this month.
