lead management system for louwman

Louwman is one of the largest automotive distributors in Europe, supplying millions of customers with vehicles from brands such as Toyota, Lexus, Morgan, and Suzuki. The organization is active in retail, leasing & financing, supply, and logistics in several countries across the continent.

In 2013, Louwman and Anchormen started working together on several data and software engineering projects which have continuously expanded since then, starting with an advanced Lead Management System and more recently adding a Data Hub solution with AWS cloud-native components.

Louwman depends on hundreds of dealerships to be a point of contact as well as to actively pursue and connect with leads that can potentially become satisfied customers. Data comes from various sources which then has to be dispatched to the right dealership. Time is of the essence because customers expect prompt and expert follow-up.

The goal was to have every request answered by the right dealer at the right place within 7 minutes. Dubbed “the 7-minute rule”, without the proper systems in place an endeavor such as this would be difficult to achieve.

Initially, Anchormen developed a web app for Louwman, called the Lead Management System (LMS) which would serve as an aggregate focal point for leads from all data sources (events, social media, dealer websites, newsletter, etc.). Moreover, in order to be able to keep the 7-minute rule, the system had to operate in real-time. The LMS allowed dealers to plan better, manage their time, and most importantly – have access to the right customer information instantaneously.

At first, Louwman hosted the LMS application at an external provider but as the number of necessary integrations and users grew, a more robust and scalable platform was required. Because of that, Anchormen rolled out the Data Hub solution on Amazon Cloud, with powerful data processing components such as EC2, SQS, RDS, and other. LMS was migrated to the AWS Data Hub platform, realizing a significant increase in performance and scalability at virtually the same cost.

With the Data Hub working as a central, processing hub for all the data from more than 80 integration sources and hundreds of websites, and the Lead Management System serving as the front-end dashboard, we are happy to say that Louwman saw an almost 40% increase in conversion rate from lead to closed sales. In addition to that, the Data Hub allows for more advanced use cases to be developed in the future.