Appraisal
The Look-to-Book number every dealer should track
You know your close rate on retail. Do you know your close rate on appraisal? That gap is still under-measured in used-car acquisition.
Every 20-group meeting talks about closing ratio on retail traffic. Almost nobody talks about closing ratio on appraisal traffic. That silence is expensive.
Look-to-Book is the appraisal equivalent of close rate. A Look is any customer who received a real appraisal number — walk-in, phone, online tool, service drive, doesn't matter. A Book is any Look that ended in you owning the vehicle. Trade, pure buy, private-party purchase — all count.
If you can't define those two words without arguing, you don't have a metric. You have a vibe.
Instrument the top of the funnel
Every appraiser writes down every appraisal. Even the ones that don't buy. Even the ones you don't want. Especially those.
Your rejections are as diagnostic as your wins. A store that only logs the cars it books is measuring vanity, not process.
The report is simple: Looks, Books, Look-to-Book rate, by appraiser, weekly. Not a punishment. A mirror. Illustrative only: one store's spread might show a strong appraiser materially ahead of a weaker one — your numbers will differ. The gap is training, judgment, and confidence — all coachable.
Separate the losses
A walk is the customer choosing to keep their vehicle. That's usually a pricing problem — you didn't stretch, or you didn't explain the number.
A loss to a competitor is a market problem — someone else stretched harder, or moved faster, or earned more trust before the number landed.
Different diagnoses. Different fixes. If you lump them together as "didn't buy," you will coach the wrong thing.
Set a floor and a ceiling — then prove them locally
Under-measured stores often bid scared. Over-measured stores sometimes overpay or get lucky and call it skill.
I won't hand you a universal healthy range. Ranges only matter when they come from your inventory strategy, your market, and a comparable dataset. Build the report first. Then set a floor and a ceiling your UCM can defend in the meeting.
Treat it like Close Ratio
Bring Look-to-Book to the same table where you argue retail close rate. Same cadence. Same ownership. Same expectation that a number without a name next to it is theater.
Used cars are an appraisal game dressed up as a sales game. Measure the game you're actually playing.