Wednesday at noon, a buyer asks whether a Peugeot 208 is still available, and whether the timing belt has been changed. The dealership replies straight away. Then nothing. Two days of silence. On Friday, the dealership follows up, and eighteen minutes later he writes: “Thanks, and sorry for the slow reply, I hadn’t seen your message.” An hour after the follow-up, a call is booked.

A buyer who goes quiet hasn’t necessarily given up

Among our customers, 65 % of buyers write only once: 899 conversations out of 1,378 in July 2026. They ask their question, and then nothing more is heard from them.

The reflex is to conclude they aren’t interested. Sometimes that’s true. But a used car buyer often writes to several sellers from their phone, and your reply lands among all the other notifications. Silence can mean “not now”, or “not seen”.

The only way to tell a lost buyer from a distracted one is to write to them a second time.

The case: a 208, two days of silence, one hour to book a call

The conversation started at the end of September, at one of our customer dealerships, on leboncoin.

• Wednesday, 12:28: the buyer asks whether the 208 is available, and whether the timing belt has been replaced.
• 12:51: the dealership confirms it’s available, offers to check the timing belt in the service book at the appointment, and gives its number.
• Thursday: nothing.
• Friday, 12:40: the dealership follows up with a precise question: “The 208 GT-Line you were looking at has colour GPS and Apple CarPlay. Is that what interested you in this model?”
• 12:58: he replies. No, not the GPS. What interests him is the automatic gearbox and the low mileage. If the service history is documented, he’s ready to come and see it. And he apologises: he hadn’t seen the message.
• 13:12: the dealership answers about the automatic gearbox and suggests a call.
• 13:22: he’d rather do it the following week.
• 13:34: the dealership offers Tuesday 9:30 or Thursday 17:00.
• 13:41: “Thursday 17:00 is perfect.”

Eighteen minutes between the follow-up and his reply. One hour between the follow-up and the booked call.

The problem with “Are you still interested?”

It’s the easiest follow-up to write, and the easiest to ignore. It asks the buyer to take a position, yes or no, without bringing them anything new. Saying “yes” commits them, saying “no” forces them to justify it: the simplest thing is not to reply at all.

The 208 follow-up talks to him about the car he was looking at, and asks a question he can answer in one line.

The follow-up that gets a reply: four rules

1. A single question, about the vehicle they looked at. Not about the dealership, not about its other cars. The buyer wrote about a 208: you talk to them about the 208.
2. A piece of information they didn’t have. A feature, a service detail. The follow-up has to be worth opening.
3. A delay that gives them room. Following up an hour after your message is pushing. In our example, two days had passed.
4. A way out in the last follow-up. “If you found something elsewhere, just let me know.” A clear “no” is better than a conversation left open for nothing.

The follow-up got it wrong, and that’s a good thing

The 208 follow-up bet on the GPS. It got it wrong: the buyer was interested in the automatic gearbox. Yet that is what made him reply. He corrected it, and in correcting it, he said what mattered to him.

A precise question, even a wrong one, gives the buyer something to correct. A vague question gives them nothing. The point of a follow-up is to give them a reason to write again, not to guess right.

Examples to adapt

Depending on what the buyer asked in their first message:

• They asked about availability: “It’s still here. Were you looking for an automatic, or is the manual fine for you?”
• They asked a technical question: “I found the invoice: the timing belt was done at 98,000 km. Would you like me to send it to you?”
• They talked about the price: “I can go through what was done on the car before it was put up for sale. Would that help you decide?”
• Last follow-up: “I don’t want to clutter your inbox: if you found something elsewhere, just let me know. Otherwise, the car is still available this week.”

These messages are examples, not templates to copy word for word: the follow-up that works picks up a detail from the conversation, and that detail is what shows the buyer they’ve been read.

Three steps, starting this week

1. List the conversations left unanswered for more than two days. On leboncoin, they’re the ones where your message is the last one.
2. For each one, write a question about the vehicle. Just one, that can be answered in one line.
3. Decide when you stop. Two or three spaced-out follow-ups, the last one with a way out, then you move on.

The hardest part is doing it for every conversation, every week, while new messages keep coming in.