Over the last year, we have used several companies to assist in the "Hurry Up and grab these hot trade-in leads" trend.  We trained staff.  We hired more staff.  We changed up templates. We followed the best practice advice from ALL of them.  

AND WE FAILED. 

The quantity was immense and our efforts in vain. They left us scratching our heads with a myriad of questions:

Foremost, why do we suck that bad at answering these leads? 

How long do we follow up with these customers?

Are they even real customers?

Do we really want the $75 car and is it worth it to take to auction? 

Frustrated, we began to try multiple sources and did a little A/B testing with our websites. One was a smidge better quality and didn't inundate us with 1000 leads a month, but still, we weren't buying up all these top-notch trades that we were promised to receive. 

Another problem...these leads aren't cheap.  They are expensive or come as part of a pricey group upgrade.  It seems like there is no good option for trade sources.

Here is what we learned after banging our head against the wall for all of 2019:

99%* of the people just want to know what their car is worth.  From our experience, we have seen that most people love just knowing.  Why? Because knowledge is power. And when they're out drinking with their buddies or chatting over coffee they can talk about it or complain about it.

Whether they love it or whether it pisses them off, that's all they wanted.  They don't want a week follow-up or 30/60/90 day followups.  They enter the info because they are required to do so to see their "value".  

The best I can tell is that giving the people what they want when they want is part of the user experience that we are all encouraged to provide. And, hopefully, when the time comes they will remember our user-friendly site and come back. We can also thank our cookies. Until then, we can tighten our purse strings on all of the third party leads and stick to the customers who are actually perusing on our website. 

Cheers to 2020!

*not an actual statistic lol

*If anyone has a great practice for these leads definitely hit me up!