8 PM on a Saturday: The Lead Lahzo's CEO Wants Answered

A buyer reaches out on a Saturday at 8 PM, as the CEO of Lahzo, which is co-hosting the webinar with RVDA, describes it. The choice, as the people behind a new dealer webinar put it, is a useful reply instead of a wait. RVDA and Lahzo are hosting a 30-minute session that runs Thursday, Nov. 19 at 2 p.m. Eastern. It's called "Finding the Right Balance Between AI and Your People."

What Just Landed for Dealers

RVDA and Lahzo are hosting a 30-minute webinar called "Finding the Right Balance Between AI and Your People." It runs Thursday, Nov. 19 at 2 p.m. Eastern.

That's the whole announcement — half an hour on one subject: how a dealership works AI into its sales and customer engagement without losing the personal ties and store culture that build long-term loyalty.

It isn't abstract, either. The session will look at practical uses of AI at each step of the RV buying journey.

Two people are on the record. Phil Ingrassia, the RVDA president, said "AI is creating new opportunities" for dealerships, and that these tools can improve many parts of how a store runs. Separately, the piece says a store can use AI to answer customer questions fast, schedule service appointments and add new revenue.

Then Brad Shepard, CEO at Lahzo, said "Your best reps will always own" the customer relationship.

And then he described the scene the whole thing turns on. His company's job, he said, is to make sure that a buyer who reaches out on a Saturday at 8 PM gets a useful reply rather than a wait — and the rep starts the next conversation already knowing what was said.

That last sentence is the one I'd underline. Hang on to it.

Why This Is Landing Now

The source doesn't hand you a chart or a study. What it says is that AI is opening new doors for dealers, and that the hard part is balancing the technology with the places where employee input stays essential.

Ingrassia's framing is the useful part: the key, he said, is knowing how to bring these tools in so they work alongside what dealership employees already know.

My read, and this is opinion, not reporting: sessions like this show up when a lot of owners have already been handed some AI tool, and the tool landed on top of a process that was already leaking. The after-hours lead is the leak.

If you run a sales floor, you know the shape of it. A lead comes in when nobody's on the clock. It gets an auto-reply. My read: by morning that buyer is often already talking to someone else.

That isn't a technology problem. That's a coverage problem. And it's the reason a 30-minute webinar about balance is worth your time.

The Line Worth Underlining

Most of the announcement is what you'd expect. An association, a company, a date, a topic. The line that carries weight is the one about Saturday night.

Read Shepard's sentence in pieces. A buyer reaches out on a Saturday at 8 PM. The problem he points to is the wait — the gap between the question and anything useful coming back. It's that the rep starts the next conversation already knowing what was said.

My read: context in hand is the part owners skip. Anyone can buy a chatbot. What makes an 8 PM lead worth anything on Monday morning is whether the thread, the questions, and the answers already given are sitting in front of the rep when they sit down.

My read: that's an operations question, not a software question. Software is how you answer it. The operations question is where the after-hours reply lands, and who reads it.

Answer that and the tool choice gets easy. Skip it and you'll buy three tools this year and still lose the Saturday lead.

What This Means If You Sell Through a Team

Everything in this section is my read. None of it comes from the article.

A B2B sales team. Picture a team selling a software subscription. A prospect fills out a demo form late Thursday night. In the version Shepard describes, that buyer gets a useful reply that night, and the rep starts Friday already knowing what was said. In the version most teams run, the form sits until the Monday standup. Same lead. Same rep. The only difference is what happened over the weekend.

A golf cart dealer. Picture a dealership on a Sunday afternoon. A family messages the Facebook page: is the four-seat cart available, and will it fit a standard garage? In Shepard's version, they get an answer that night and your rep picks it up Monday with the whole thread in front of them. In the version most stores run, that family spends Sunday evening shopping and calls the next dealer on the list Monday morning. You paid for that lead either way.

A trailer dealer. Picture a Saturday morning. A contractor calls at 7:30 about a dump trailer he needs for a Monday job. He isn't browsing. He's buying. The source also mentions AI helping dealers schedule service appointments, which matters if you run a service bay — same math, different department.

In all three cases, the fix is the same. The conversation has to still be warm when a human shows up. That's the balance Ingrassia and Shepard are describing, and it's the part you actually control.

How to Use This Week

Six steps. None of them cost anything.

1. Pull 30 days of after-hours leads. Open your CRM, or your lead-form inbox, or your Facebook page inbox and your missed-call list. Export every lead that came in after 6 PM or on a weekend. Fifteen minutes.

1. Time your first human reply on ten of them. Write down the lead's timestamp and the timestamp of the first reply that came from a person, not an auto-responder. Average it. That average is the number this whole webinar is really about. Twenty minutes.

1. Write one after-hours message your team can send. Not a promise to get back to them. Something that answers a real question and asks one back.

1. Decide who owns the handoff, by name. Shepard's version only works if the rep starts the next conversation already knowing what was said. So whatever answers the 8 PM message has to land somewhere the rep reads at 8 AM. If it lands in a different inbox than the rep's, the context is gone. Ten minutes.

1. Put the webinar on the calendar. Thursday, Nov. 19 at 2 p.m. Eastern. I'd start on RVDA's site. Thirty minutes.

1. Leave with one change written down. One sentence, one owner, one deadline. Name the owner, and that person sends the after-hours reply from the shared inbox starting Monday. That's it.

Here are three after-hours scripts you can hand your team today. Paste them into whatever AI tool you already use, or copy the structure by hand.

You are writing an after-hours reply for a B2B sales team. A prospect asked for a demo late Thursday night. Write four sentences: confirm we got it, reference the one thing they asked about, offer two specific call windows tomorrow, and ask one question about their timeline. Plain language. No exclamation points.

Write a Sunday-night text reply for a golf cart dealer. The customer asked whether a four-seat cart is available and whether it fits a standard garage. Keep it to three sentences: tell them we will confirm availability first thing Monday, offer two appointment times, and ask if they are buying for a neighborhood or a course.

Write a Saturday-morning reply for a trailer dealer. A contractor called at 7:30 AM about a dump trailer he needs for a Monday job. Three sentences: tell him when we open, ask the payload and what he is towing with, and offer to hold a unit until noon.

Mistakes to Avoid

• Letting the tool answer and then leaving the thread stranded. If the after-hours reply doesn't land in front of the rep, you added a step instead of removing one.
• Measuring only your average response time. Averages hide the leads that died. Track your worst one too.
• Turning it on for every lead source on day one. Pick one — Facebook messages, or web forms — and run it for a week before you touch anything else.
• Leaving the webinar without an owner. A tool with no name attached to it becomes nobody's job by Friday.