Maximizing Internet Leads

“A study on the effectiveness of internet leads is kind of like shining a flashlight on a roach in a restaurant kitchen. You don’t have to tell the restaurant owner the cockroach is bad.” That was Cameron O’Hagan, V.P. of Metrics and Analytics for Pied Piper Management, a data science company that helps retailers in agriculture, powersports and automotive industries.

“For dealers, it’s not that they’re performing poorly on purpose or maliciously, they just might not be aware,” O’Hagan continued.

Pied Piper recently released its 2025 ILE study – that’s Internet Lead Effectiveness – for compact tractor dealers in the U.S. The study shows how responsive dealerships (by brand) are to internet leads. Pied Piper reports the results by brand manufacturer, not by individual dealers, though dealers can work with Pied Piper independently. 

Who won? Kubota dealers, and they should be proud of their efforts, especially since they made improvements from last year’s results. But they shouldn’t get cocky about it. They, and the entire compact tractor industry, have a lot more improving to do. Tractor dealers perform worse than powersports dealers in these metrics, and those dealers lag behind auto dealers. 

Pied Piper spells it out in its study results, writing, “In the 2025 compact tractor bell curve of performance, 4% of all compact tractor dealerships industrywide scored above 80 (providing a quick and thorough personal response), while 59% of dealerships scored below 40 (failing to personally respond to their website customers). In contrast, 34% of auto dealers score over 80, and 14% of powersports dealers score over 80. (Pied Piper has not yet studied “outdoor power equipment” dealers specifically, but this study of compact tractor retailers covers similar territory.)

“The effort is worth it,” said O’Hagan. Historically, dealers who improve their ILE performance from scoring under 40 to scoring over 80 on average double the number of units sold from the same quantity of internet leads.”

We’ll get into more detailed results in this article. But before we get into that, let’s look at the importance of responding to customer communication that comes at dealers through a website. We spoke with O’Hagan about the work, and with Kubota’s Derric Lookenbill, director of dealer development.

All leads are valuable

“Not all leads are the same,” said Kevin Sabourin, an industry advisor and technology strategist. “But all leads are valuable; you just can’t spend a lot of time or money on the premature ones.” Sabourin points to real estate professionals who have done a lot of work to categorize and quantify leads based on where they come from. “Realtors get it. Our industry is way behind.”

Sabourin said that dealers need to take the time to collect data and then study it. “The people side of every power equipment dealership is ultra important and that won’t go away,” he said. “But you need to use available technology to supplement the human side of this business, to help you find buyers, identify them, and then get them into your store. Do you have a CRM (Customer Relationship Management system) that tells you the details of every customer, their products, their potential needs? Basically, are you using the data that is available?”

Sabourin’s question about using the data gets back to O’Hagan’s joke about the roach in the kitchen. The restaurant owner didn’t need to shine the light on the roach to know it was there or could have been there. He needed to do act to remove or prevent roaches. Similarly, OPE dealer sales teams should know that leads are coming in, or at least that the website (or social media, or email campaign) allows them to. Are they doing anything about it? Are salespeople collecting the leads, assigning them to the right people, and responding to them? 

Pay attention to leads

“Our dealers focused in on response time and knowing the system,” said Lookenbill of Kubota. “They had two primary goals. First, responding more quickly. And second, making sure they address the system’s auto response. Some dealers did not realize the leads were coming in or that the responses were not going out. So it was bringing the attention to internet leads.” Lookenbill said that what registered with a lot of dealers is to think about a customer that comes into their store late on a Friday afternoon. “Are you going to shut the door on those customers?”

Most shoppers today, whether looking for a car, a chain saw or a pair of shoes, visit a website before visiting a retailer. Power equipment dealers who encourage these website customers to interact online (essentially “meeting the customer online”) end up selling more products to them. Auto dealers learned this a lesson 15 or 20 years ago. Then powersports dealers got wise to it. Finally other industries like ag and OPE, are starting to learn as well.

Pied Piper has found that, among dealers they’ve studied, quick and personal response to website customer inquiries means 50% more unit sales on average to the same quantity of website customers, compared to dealers who fail to personally respond. O’Hagan said that web-response behaviors directly impact “web-lead-close-rates” or, in other words, the number of units a dealership sells to customers who first contact the dealership via the dealer website. 

Kubota enables this, according to Lookenbill, through its Kaizen Excellence Program. This is the OEM’s award recognition program for dealers to show continuous improvement. “There are no dollar incentives tied to this,” he said. “Dealers can ignore this. But it will help dealers sell more tractors.” 

Vital but not always simple

O’Hagan said that even car dealers today have trouble responding effectively to web shoppers. They are invisible compared to in-store shoppers and all the operations tasks of running a dealership. When busy employees decide what to do next, the web customers are typically out of sight and out of mind. 

“One way for dealers to find improvement,” said O’Hagan, “is to make sure these lead emails are not sitting in a spam folder.” 

Also, know that some people prefer email, others like text messages and some want a phone call. “You need to hit the customer with multiple paths of communication, then continue with the method that the customer responds to,” O’Hagan said. It’s not about the communication method that your salespeople prefer to use. It’s the one the potential customer prefers. 

You also need to make sure your technology is working; web service providers can have breakdowns too. “A tractor client of ours,” said O’Hagan, “thought it was doing a good job with response time, but the web provider was having difficulties so only about 30 percent of the responses were even going out.” 

“Our data has shown that, beyond 24 hours, the customer is far less interested. So this study focused on that first 24-hour time frame,” said O’Hagan. 

Here’s how the ILE study worked

Pied Piper submitted customer inquiries through the websites of 726 compact tractor dealerships representing all major brands. Each inquiry asked a specific question about a tractor in inventory and included a customer name, email address, and local telephone number. Pied Piper then evaluated the speed and quality of dealership responses by email, telephone, chat, and text message over the next 24 hours, creating an ILE overall score ranging between 0 and 100.

This year dealers were more likely to quickly answer a web customer’s inquiry by email or text: 27% of the time on average for 2025 vs 22% of the time for 2024. In contrast, dealers were less likely to respond to web customers using multiple paths (email, text, phone): 11% of the time on average vs 13% for 2024. Customers were more likely to be “ghosted” this year, receiving no response from dealers 20% of the time on average, compared to 18% last year.

The average Kubota ILE score in 2025 increased from 37 to 42, the largest gain among compact tractor brands. The percentage of Kubota dealers scoring over 80 rose from 6% in 2024 to 10% in 2025, exceeding the 2025 industry average of 4%. Dealers scoring below 40 dropped slightly from 47% to 46%, well below the industry average of 59%. Kubota dealers responded to customers via multiple communication paths 21% of the time, compared to the 11% industry average. 

Opportunity for improvement

The behavior most likely to boost compact tractor sales is adopting a multi-channel communication strategy instead of responding to customers using only email, only phone, or only text. Many customers miss emails, ignore calls, or get overwhelmed by texts. Successful dealerships respond via multiple channels to ensure contact and then switch to the customer’s preferred method for future communication. In the 2025 ILE study, 60% of compact tractor dealers relied on a single channel, while only 11% used multiple channels. Performance varied widely among brands—21% of Kubota dealers used multiple paths, compared to less than 5% for New Holland, Bobcat, McCormick, or Case. In comparison, auto and powersports dealers fared better, with 44% and 26% using multiple channels, respectively. 

Lookenbill said it’s also about campaign reinforcement. “A couple years ago, a lot of dealers didn’t know what we meant by ‘omni channel’ sales communication. Now, many more of them know and understand omni channel. And they’re putting it to work to make the most of internet leads.” 

2025 Performance comparison by industry

Response to customer web inquiries in 2025 had large variation by industry, as shown by these examples:

“Answered Question” – How often did the dealerships email or text an answer to a website customer’s question?

• Industry averages: 46% Tractor vs. 50% Powersport & 59% Automotive

“Phoned Customer” – How often did the dealerships respond by phone to a website customer’s inquiry?

• Industry averages: 25% Tractor vs. 45% Powersport & 68% Automotive

“Did at least one” – How often did the dealerships email or text an answer to a website customer’s question and/or respond by phone?

• Industry averages: 60% Tractor vs. 70% Powersport & 81% Automotive

“Did both” – How often did the dealerships email or text an answer to a website customer’s question and also phone the customer?

• Industry averages: 11% Tractor vs. 26% Powersport & 44% Automotive

“Failed to Respond” – How often did the website customer fail to receive a response of any type (email, text, or phone call)?

• Industry averages: 20% Tractor vs. 10% Powersport & 7% Automotive