Every dealership tracks lost deals.

Very few actually learn from them.

That disconnect is exactly what Elisabeth “Betsy” Marietti, Solution Manager for Direct-to-Dealer Strategy and Enablement at Urban Science, addressed in this ASOTU Edge Webinar. Her message was simple and uncomfortable: knowing who you lost does not help unless you understand why they walked.

Urban Science’s upcoming enhancement to SalesAlert is built to answer that question by going straight to the source. The customer who bought somewhere else.

Most defection reporting ends too early. A lead closes out. The CRM moves on. The story stops.

Betsy walked through why that creates blind spots.

Dealers assume pricing was the issue. Or inventory. Or timing. Meanwhile, customers are reacting to smaller moments that rarely show up in reports. Slow follow-up. Confusing communication. A website that worked against them instead of helping.

The defection survey captures those moments directly. Short, focused questions tied to specific parts of the experience. Sales approach. Website usability. Basic execution. No fluff. No interpretation required.

One reason this works is where it lives.

The feedback flows into the same systems managers already use. No extra dashboards to check. No new habits to build. Betsy explained that dealers can even auto-close defection records inside their CRM once the data is captured.

That matters. Insights only drive change when they fit into daily workflow.

Early adopters are already seeing movement.

After six months, stores using defection feedback posted an average 6.5% sales lift, roughly 25 additional units, without adding leads or increasing spend. The gains came from fixing repeat issues that customers flagged again and again.

Faster responses. Cleaner handoffs. Fewer dropped balls.

For sales managers, this shifts the tone of coaching.

Instead of debating opinions, leaders can point to customer comments. Instead of guessing what broke, they can see patterns. Betsy described how this turns feedback into leverage. Coaching becomes specific. Accountability sticks. Conversations move faster.

Sales teams respond differently when the voice in the room belongs to the customer.

Dealers spend their days inside their own systems. Customers experience the friction those systems create.

The defection survey forces an outside view. It highlights how the store feels when someone is navigating the website late at night, waiting on a callback, or deciding whether to trust a salesperson. Over time, the noise drops away and the real problems surface.

Those problems are usually fixable.

This SalesAlert enhancement does not promise miracles. It gives direction.

Lost customers are already explaining what went wrong. Elisabeth Marietti and the Urban Science team built a way for dealers to hear it clearly, organize it, and act on it while it still matters.

For stores serious about execution, this is less about surveys and more about finally paying attention to the deals that got away.