I have called several car dealerships asking to be put in contact with their Internet Sales Manager. I ask the manager for their email address so that I can send them my Lease Quote Request outlining what I’m looking for and what information I need from them. On 3 occasions I have been asked for MY email address and have been told that they will send me an email and when I receive the email, I will then receive THEIR email address. I have not received an email back from those 3 dealerships. Is this their way of not dealing with someone that does not want to come into their dealership to negotiate?
Use the chat function/bot … then someone should follow up over email
Otherwise just move on.
What do mean by “use the chat function/bot”?
I usually find the car I’m interested on their website, and use the contact form from there. That gets it into their CRM system, which most seem to use to generate and track their emails.
Some dealerships can’t seem to operate in this modern world. The message here is What … That they don’t want your business unless you come on down and let Guido (“The Closer”) put you in a hammerlock
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Others were more than happy to give me their email address and even emailed back later to ask for additional information.
On any semi-modern dealer website, once you start browsing a chat window appears
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Ever notice that for some odddddd reason every chat “bot” is always a 10 out of 10 model looking female that is literally available to chat 24 hours a day
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Have you thought about looking on the website for the names / numbers / email address on the “Meet the Team” and then figure out who it is. Should the email not be listed for that person, call the main number and just say you wrote Joe’s email down wrong b/c one just got kicked back to you and you want to make sure its J.Smith@Toyota or whoever…obv pretend like you know who you are trying to track down.
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Well this is weird first of all…calling for an email
BDC managers track stats for internet inquiries so it’s important to reach to them through the website.
They’re also paid on volume (not gross) and conversion is important.
So normal protocol (and what the websites are designed for) is to contact them through the button and email them all of your specifics once they reply.
Re chatbots-personally I can’t stand them but I guess this is the way of the world with companies like Drift etc. The function doesn’t do anything for me as a consumer but there’s a great chance I don’t understand all of its capabilities.
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mystery car…
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Great advice. When I was making all those calls to the dealers, I felt like I was a salesperson cold-calling. 
Lol the short version of what I wrote is…
You’re putting in all the effort 
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Is it possible that you’re asking for too much information? My interactions aren’t as great when I ask for every detail of a lease up front (e.g., MF, residual, selling cost, rebates, etc). They seem to get annoyed when I do this and suspect that they might just flag you as being a pain compared to other customers.
My personal work around - I research the car, incentives, RV/MF, etc and build a deal on the LH calculator. for my “target” price. Then, I just go asking multiple dealerships for straight forward quotes (for me, that’s whatever length/mileage that I want, and everything, including taxes/fees/etc rolled into the lease except for first month DAS). However they want to slice and dice the numbers doesn’t matter to me if they get to my target deal I want. Saves me a lot of drama and frustration with going back and forth trying to get every number. One thing I noticed when I leased my XC60 is my salesperson had no clue how leases worked/were calculated - she literally put in numbers into a worksheet and quoted me the number.
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Thus far I have gotten what I have asked for, i.e., MSRP, my price for the vehicle, net cap cost, MF, RV, and monthly payment w/o taxes. Mind you, I am doing this all via email.
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I took your advice and did this. A few of the websites had the “Meet Our Team” on them with links to email them.
Now if you don’t hear from those people, I have noticed some dealership’s website aren’t exactly up to date since covid. Someone I previously dealt with at a dealer never replied and was still on the website, I found out a week later they were furloughed and that particular dealership was was foolish enough not to forward people’s emails to someone who was actually working.
One reason Sales tries to funnel all leads into their CRM.
What is the car?
Fair enough, hope you score a great deal!
I’ve done this when trying to buy a car, and met with a lot of resistance and straight up negativity and paranoia from steal-yer-s#!7$.
One of them accused me of trying to sell THEM something, that I must be collecting emails to try to spam/sell them some product they’re not interested in.
Also had dealerships give me an attitude when I emailed a detailed request, like a sarcastic mocking reply in response to a brief line I put in the email about having bought many cars successfully this way before.
Dealerships prefer uninformed customers is all I can conclude. We are the lowest margin PITA customers they don’t want to deal with, but they’ll begrudgingly sell us a car if they’re desperate to hit that number that day.