I shopped my own market. The managers' reactions surprised me more than the results.

I sent an inquiry into a dealership at 9:15 on a weeknight, the way a customer does. Then I did the same thing at other stores in the same market, and I wrote down what came back.

One store never made a single human attempt in five days. Another had a modern CRM and a messaging assistant running, and it still stopped after one call and a voicemail.

None of that surprised me. I spent 25 years inside stores. I know what the second week of a lead looks like.

The explanations were the surprise

I asked one manager about it directly. Off to the side, nobody listening, nothing to save face over. He said they don't hammer or pester people. He wasn't embarrassed. He was describing store policy, and he believed it was the customer-friendly choice.

A second store had a different answer. I'd called the wrong number.

That one should bother you more than it bothered the person who said it. I called the number that comes up in a Google search. The one on the map listing, the one people in that town have had in their phones for years. So what that store was telling me is that calls arriving on their most publicly visible line land outside whatever they measure. Not handled badly. Not seen at all.

That stops being a follow-up problem and becomes an attribution problem, and it quietly makes every other number in the building wrong.

Here is what I keep coming back to. Neither of them was lying to me. They believed their stores were handling leads, because as far as either could see, their stores were handling leads. Nobody walks the floor looking for the customer who isn't there.

I wrote the whole thing up

It's called The Silent Leak. About 6,000 words, no cost, no form to fill out. It covers what came back from each store, why the second touch is the one that goes missing, what the industry numbers say that costs a store, and what a fix looks like that doesn't mean replacing your CRM or your people.

There's a chapter near the end I'd point you to even if you read nothing else: five things you can check at your own store this week. Pull ten leads from sixty days ago and count the actual human attempts. Call your own number after hours. Those five checks will tell you more about your store than any vendor presentation will, mine included.

What this is, plainly

I'm not a neutral party. I sell an aged lead reactivation service, and the last chapter of the guide says so in as many words. I left the store names out because the point was never to embarrass anybody, and the managers I talked to were being honest with me.

Read The Silent Leak

The field observations described here are a small sample from one market and are reported as what happened, not as a statistical study. Store names have been withheld.