WheelsAI: how UK dealers get to inbound leads inside 60 seconds

The bottleneck

UK used-car dealers compete on speed-to-lead. When a buyer enquires on AutoTrader, eBay Motors, or a dealer's own listing, the first dealer to call back wins more than half the deal. The data is well-known: industry average response time is 47 minutes, and conversion drops sharply after the first five.

Most dealer CRMs route the enquiry into a queue and rely on a human salesperson to act. That works in office hours. After 5pm, on weekends, during a busy Saturday afternoon — leads queue up, and competitors pick them off.

On top of that, every dealer is sitting on a pile of historical enquiries that went cold. Buyers who looked, didn't buy, and slipped off the radar. The standard SaaS CRM marks them as "lost" and forgets them. The dealers know there's revenue in those names — they don't have the time or the tooling to chase them.

What I built

WheelsAI was engineered from scratch around how a UK dealer actually operates.

• Inbound lead pipeline. The moment an enquiry lands — from a syndicated listing, the dealer's own website, or one of the marketplace integrations — the system parses it, qualifies it against the inventory, and fires a personalised SMS to the buyer inside 60 seconds. In the buyer's eyes, the dealer always responds first.
• Dormant-buyer recovery engine. A continuously-running process identifies buyers who went cold 30–90 days post-enquiry. Each one gets a targeted re-engagement sequence (SMS + email, sequenced over days, content tailored to their original interest). The dealer does nothing manually.
• Inventory intelligence. Newly-listed vehicles auto-trigger market-pricing analysis within ~60 seconds. The dealer sees market position, competitor pricing, and recommended positioning before the vehicle even goes live to buyers.
• Outbound voice agent (V12). A bespoke VAPI-orchestrated voice system handles dealer recruitment calls with IVR navigation (DTMF), gatekeeper handling, transfer patience, time-aware greetings, and transcript analysis. Automated daily campaigns run each weekday at 9am. No off-the-shelf auto-dialer offers transcript-aware orchestration at this level.
• Email campaign infrastructure. A complete lead-discovery + outreach pipeline combining OpenStreetMap, Companies House verification, and statistical A/B testing on subject lines via Claude Haiku (chi-squared gating at p<0.05).

Every component was built bespoke because no off-the-shelf dealer CRM combines them — and the gaps between off-the-shelf tools are exactly where the leads were leaking.

What changed

For dealers running on the platform, the operational shape changes in concrete ways:

• 60-second SMS response on inbound enquiries — vs. 47-minute industry average. The dealer is always first.
• ~60-second inventory intelligence on every new listing — market pricing analysis is ready before the vehicle is live to buyers.
• 24/7 inbound coverage — Speed-to-Lead Agent qualifies, replies, and books with no manual triage. Weekends and after-hours are real working time on the platform.
• Marketplace syndication built in on Enterprise — one listing on WheelsAI is automatically rewritten and published to AutoTrader, eBay Motors and Facebook Marketplace with platform-correct photos, copy and pricing. Pause, reprice and retire happen everywhere in one click.
• Full DMS workspace on every plan — stock, leads, deals, invoicing, paperwork. Most dealers retire whatever stand-alone DMS they were paying for. Three plans: Forecourt £249/mo, Growing £500/mo, Enterprise from £1,000/mo.
• 30-day cancel-anytime, no commission, no contracts. Dealers move tier as their stock grows; no per-vehicle fees, ever.
• The Lead Revival Agent autonomously re-engages dormant buyers at a 31% conversion rate on previously cold enquiries — buyers the dealer would otherwise have written off as lost.

The work continues — the platform is in active development, with new dealers onboarded as capacity allows.