What a Dealership BDC Manager Does: Daily Routine and Weekly Scorecard

A BDC manager runs a dealership's business development center, the team that answers leads and phone calls and books sales and service appointments. The BDC manager hires and trains agents, reviews calls and messages, sets daily priorities and reports results to the general manager and department heads. Below: a daily routine, a call-review checklist and a weekly scorecard.

At a glance

• A BDC manager is judged on appointments that show and sell, not on how many calls the team makes.
• A BDC manager's day is mostly inspection and coaching: checking that every lead has a reply and an owner, then listening to real conversations.
• A one-page weekly BDC scorecard with seven numbers, counted from CRM and phone records, is enough to run the team and to settle handoff disputes with the sales floor.
• BDC manager pay plans described in trade sources usually combine a base salary with a bonus or override tied to what the agents produce, with extra weight on shown appointments.

What a BDC manager is responsible for

A BDC manager is responsible for the people, the process and the numbers of a dealership's business development center. Dealership job postings and trade guides describe much the same list. A BDC manager posting from Nissan of Boerne (October 2026) and ACV Auctions' guide to the role (November 2024) both include these duties:

• Hiring and training. Recruiting BDC agents, onboarding them and training phone etiquette and appointment setting.
• Daily operations. Making sure inbound calls, web leads and texts are answered, and that outbound follow-up happens.
• Call review and coaching. Listening to recorded or live calls and coaching each agent on the outcomes.
• Campaigns. Deciding which customers to contact, based on the dealership's current marketing and service initiatives.
• Reporting. Running daily, weekly and monthly reports, including individual call results for each agent.
• Working with other departments. Coordinating with the sales and service managers who receive the appointments, and taking part in management meetings.

Titles and reporting lines vary with the size of the store. BDC AI's overview of BDC management (February 2024) says larger dealerships often have a dedicated BDC director or manager, some BDCs add team leads who manage small groups of agents, and at small dealerships the sales manager or general manager may run BDC work directly. The same responsibilities apply at RV, marine and powersports dealerships that have a person or team answering leads and booking appointments, whatever the store calls that job.

A BDC manager's daily routine

A workable BDC manager daily routine has four blocks: open with an inspection, coach in the morning, fix handoffs at midday and close every loop before the team leaves. The routine below is a suggested structure built from the duties in the sources above, not an industry standard, so adjust the timing to your store's hours.

Before the BDC opens: inspect overnight leads and today's appointments

• Check every lead that arrived after hours. Each one should have a personal reply or a clear next task with an owner.
• Check missed calls and voicemails from the previous evening and assign callbacks.
• Pull today's appointment list. Confirm that each appointment has a confirmation sent and a named salesperson or service advisor waiting for it.
• Look for leads with no owner. A lead with no owner is easy to miss, because nobody is waiting to reply to it.

First half of the morning: a short huddle and live coaching

• Hold a short huddle: yesterday's shown appointments, today's appointment count and one skill to practise.
• Listen to two or three calls or read two or three message threads per agent, and give feedback the same day.
• Sit beside, or listen live to, any new agent for part of the morning.

Midday: handoffs and no-shows

• Check with the sales and service managers that the morning's appointments were met by the person named in the CRM.
• Move every morning no-show to a rebooking task within the same day.
• Re-check response times on leads that arrived during the morning rush.

Last hour: close every loop

• Confirm that tomorrow's appointments have confirmations scheduled.
• Check that every conversation today has an outcome logged in the CRM: appointment set, no answer, not interested, sold or lost.
• Decide who covers leads that arrive after the BDC closes, and how quickly they will get a personal reply.

One caution about daily targets. BDC consultant Joni Stuker-Davis, in a DealersEdge excerpt on BDC pay plans (May 2024), advises against daily goals and suggests judging agents over a longer period while correcting problems as they appear. The daily routine above is for inspection and coaching; the scorecard below is where performance is judged.

The weekly BDC manager cadence

A BDC manager's week needs five fixed meetings or tasks so that coaching, handoffs and campaigns do not get squeezed out by the phones. A suggested weekly cadence:

• Start of the week: scorecard review. Fill in last week's scorecard (below) and pick one number to improve this week.
• One-on-ones with each agent. Fifteen minutes per agent on that agent's own numbers and one recorded conversation.
• Group call review. Play one strong and one weak conversation to the whole team and agree on what to copy.
• Handoff meeting with the sales and service managers. Go through shown appointments that did not sell, no-shows and any disputed handoffs.
• Campaign planning. Choose next week's outbound lists, such as unsold showroom visitors, service customers due for maintenance or declined repairs.

Some show-rate problems start when the appointment is booked. In the same DealersEdge excerpt, Stuker-Davis advises against booking appointments more than 72 hours out and recommends getting a second phone number for every customer. Treat those as one consultant's practices to test, not as rules.

BDC call and message review checklist

A BDC call review checklist turns a manager's listening time into coaching an agent can act on. Score each recorded call or message thread against the same questions, so agents are compared fairly and progress is visible over time:

1. Did the agent reply to the question the customer actually asked, such as price, availability or trade value, before asking for anything?
2. Did the agent use the customer's preferred channel (call, text or email)?
3. Did the agent confirm the specific vehicle, or the specific service concern?
4. Did the agent find out timing, trade-in and who else is involved in the decision?
5. Did the agent offer a specific date and time, rather than "come in any time"?
6. Did the agent name the person the customer will meet?
7. Did the agent send a written confirmation with the address and appointment time?
8. If the customer said no, did the agent set a follow-up task with a date?
9. Was the outcome logged in the CRM with the right status?
10. Did the agent stay within store policy on price and financing discussions?

Score each question yes or no, and coach on one question at a time. Call recording consent rules differ from state to state, so confirm your recording notice and process with your dealership's attorney before recording or reviewing calls.

A one-page weekly BDC scorecard

A weekly BDC scorecard should count outcomes from CRM and phone records, not agents' own tallies, and should show the team total and each agent on one page. These seven numbers cover the funnel from lead to sale:

• First response time. Median minutes from a lead arriving to the first personal reply, with business hours and after hours shown separately.
• Contact rate. Leads that had a two-way conversation, divided by new leads.
• Appointment set rate. Appointments set, divided by leads contacted.
• Show rate. Appointments where the customer arrived, divided by appointments due that week.
• Sold from shown. Sales or repair orders from shown appointments, divided by shown appointments. The BDC shares this number with the sales or service team.
• Missed calls called back. Missed calls returned the same business day, divided by missed calls.
• Open leads with no next task. A count, which should be zero.

For an outside reference point, Foureyes tracked 2.6 million leads from more than 1,150 dealerships in 48 U.S. markets through the first quarter of 2026. Foureyes reported averages of 69% for contact rate, 40% for appointment set rate, 59% for show rate and 18.5% for close rate, with wide differences between markets (show rate ranged from 41% to 74%). Foureyes sells software to dealerships, its figures cover all leads at the stores it tracks rather than only BDC-handled leads, and its definitions may not match yours. Your own week-to-week trend is the better yardstick.

Worked example: reading one week's BDC scorecard

The figures in this example are invented to show the arithmetic; they are not data from any dealership. Suppose a BDC received 120 new leads in a week, had two-way conversations with 84 of them (a 70% contact rate) and set 34 appointments (a 40% set rate from contacted leads). Thirty appointments were due that week, 18 customers arrived (a 60% show rate) and 4 bought (22% sold from shown).

A manager reading that week's scorecard would not start with the sales count. The contact and set rates are close to the Foureyes averages, so the first question is the 12 appointments that did not show: were they confirmed, were they booked more than a few days out, and was each one moved to a rebooking task? The second question is the 36 leads that were never contacted: when did they arrive, and who owned them? Fixing either gap adds shown appointments without adding leads.

If you cannot fill in this scorecard from your current systems, the complimentary Revenue Leak Audit from Shiftix Cloud reviews lead response, follow-up, conversion and accountability, with no obligation and no software purchase required.

How BDC manager pay plans are usually structured

BDC manager pay plans described in trade sources usually pair a base salary with a bonus tied to what the BDC agents produce. The sources below describe structures and opinions, not survey data, and two of them are more than three years old.

• Base plus override. Greg Wells, writing in Auto Dealer Today (June 2014, more than three years old), describes the manager's plan as a base salary with an override on what the agents produce, puts more emphasis on kept appointments than on sales, and says a skilled BDC manager should earn similar income to the people who supervise the sales team.
• Pay on more than sold internet leads. The DealersEdge excerpt (May 2024) calls plans that pay only on sold internet leads one-dimensional, and says the manager's goal is to get every member of the team performing at standard.
• Agents paid for shown appointments. Steve Stauning, on DealerRefresh (2016, updated 2019; more than three years old), argues that agents should earn a flat amount for each appointment that shows, paid for by the salespeople who sell those deals, and that "involvement" in a deal should be defined in writing before the first commission is paid.

The common thread is to pay on shown appointments and team results, because those are what a BDC manager controls. Pay levels vary by market and store size; no current, independent survey of BDC manager pay was found for this article, so none is quoted.

What to look for when hiring a BDC manager

When hiring a BDC manager, look for proof that the candidate has run a team on numbers and coached from real conversations. Job postings ask for dealership BDC experience (the Nissan of Boerne posting lists it as a requirement), and the ACV Auctions guide names automotive experience, call center experience and team management as useful backgrounds. Questions that test those skills in an interview:

• Which numbers did you report each week, and which one did you improve? By how much, and how?
• Walk through how you review a call and what you say to the agent afterward.
• How did you handle disputes with the sales floor over who gets credit for an appointment?
• What did you do the last time an agent was missing targets for a month?
• How do you decide which follow-up an automated message can handle and which needs a person?

Some dealers promote their best BDC agent. That can work, but booking appointments and coaching other people to book them are different skills, so test the coaching part directly.

Where software fits in a BDC manager's job

Software helps a BDC manager most by showing, in one place, which leads have no reply, no owner or no next step. The specific tools differ by vendor; whichever you use, check that it can produce the scorecard above without manual counting. Shiftix Cloud works alongside a dealership's DMS rather than replacing it, and its published product pages describe these capabilities relevant to a BDC manager:

• CRM. The Shiftix Cloud CRM page describes lead routing by source, vehicle type, location or round-robin with assignment gap monitoring, lead aging and stall flags, and manager visibility of ownership, stage and activity across the pipeline.
• Unified Customer Inbox. The Unified Customer Inbox page lists phone, email, SMS, website forms, Facebook Messenger and live chat, with conversation assignment and reassignment so the next owner can see the earlier exchange.
• Signal Call Intelligence. The Signal Call Intelligence page describes reviewing available sales conversations for tone, objections, questions and follow-through, and preparing coaching conversations for each employee, with human judgment in control.
• Aria AI Assistant. The Aria AI Assistant page says it replies to new leads and drafts follow-up for staff to review and approve. Aria AI Assistant is human-controlled: staff remain responsible for communication and decisions.

Automated first replies change a BDC manager's job rather than remove it. The manager's attention moves to the handoff from the automated reply to a person, and to the conversations software handles poorly. The guide to what a car dealership BDC does covers that shift in more detail.

Next steps

The right next step for a BDC manager depends on which number on the scorecard is weakest:

• No scorecard yet. Build the seven-number scorecard from last month's CRM and phone records before changing anything else.
• Slow first replies. Compare your times with the research in speed to lead statistics for dealers, then fix after-hours coverage first.
• Low contact rate. Add text to your follow-up; text messaging rules and templates for dealerships covers consent and wording.
• Low show rate. Tighten confirmations and the booking window, and rebook every no-show the same day.
• Still deciding how to staff the BDC. Read the comparison of in-house, outsourced and hybrid BDC models.

For an outside view of where leads and appointments are slipping, request the Revenue Leak Audit. It is complimentary, carries no obligation and requires no software purchase; Shiftix Cloud looks at lead response, follow-up, conversion, customer retention, accountability and workflow, then walks through the findings with you.

Frequently asked questions

Who does a BDC manager report to?

A BDC manager usually reports to the general manager, the dealer principal or the sales manager, depending on the size of the dealership. BDC AI's overview of BDC management says medium-sized stores often have a BDC manager reporting to the general manager or sales manager, while larger stores may have a BDC director reporting to the general manager or dealer principal. Whatever the line, the BDC manager needs a standing meeting with the sales and service managers, because BDC results depend on what happens after each handoff.

How do you become a BDC manager?

Most BDC managers are promoted from inside a BDC or from a dealership sales or service role, and dealership postings commonly ask for BDC experience. Useful preparation includes learning to read CRM reports, reviewing recorded calls and coaching peers, and taking ownership of one measurable result, such as a team's show rate. Call center management experience outside the auto industry can also transfer, but a candidate will need to learn how dealership sales and service departments work.

Should a BDC manager also take calls?

A BDC manager at a small store often takes some calls, but the job should be planned so that coaching and inspection come first. If the manager spends most of the day on the phone, nobody is checking unassigned leads, missed calls or handoffs, which are the gaps that cost appointments. A practical compromise is for the manager to take overflow calls at peak times only, and to keep the morning inspection and call-review time protected.

Does an RV, marine or powersports dealership need a BDC manager?

An RV, marine or powersports dealership needs someone doing the BDC manager's job, even if it is not a separate position. At a smaller store the sales manager or service manager often covers it. The work is the same: check that every lead and call gets a reply and an owner, review conversations, track shown appointments and coordinate handoffs. Seasonal swings in these stores make the weekly scorecard more useful, because it shows whether follow-up holds up in the busy months.

Sources

• Nissan of Boerne, BDC Manager job posting (October 10, 2026)
• ACV Auctions, What Is a BDC Manager and How Do You Become One? (November 8, 2024)
• BDC AI, Are BDCs managers at a car dealership? (February 20, 2024)
• DealersEdge, BDC Pay Plan Strategies from Joni Stuker-Davis (May 23, 2024)
• Foureyes, Dealership Close Rates by Metro (May 28, 2026)
• Auto Dealer Today, Your BDC Pay Plan, Greg Wells (June 1, 2014)
• DealerRefresh, How You Structure a Pay Plan for a BDC, Steve Stauning (2016, updated 2019)
• Shiftix Cloud CRM
• Shiftix Cloud Unified Customer Inbox
• Shiftix Cloud Signal Call Intelligence
• Shiftix Cloud Aria AI Assistant
• Shiftix Cloud Revenue Leak Audit