How vehicles are sold in South Africa
The portals set the pace
South African buyers shop the listing portals first, and they enquire on several near-identical vehicles at once. The dealership that responds inside the first hour usually gets the viewing; the one that responds the next afternoon gets a polite already sorted, thanks. Response speed is measurable, coachable and almost entirely a systems problem — which is why it belongs in a CRM rather than in a morning pep talk.
The bank is the third party in every deal
Because most purchases are financed, the sale is really two approvals: the buyer's yes and the bank's yes. Between them sits a waiting period where deals are lost to silence. The dealerships that convert best treat the finance wait as an active sales stage — chasing the application, updating the buyer, preparing a plan B lender — rather than dead time.