1,852 Trade-In Leads in 8 Months From Traffic the Store Already Had
An independent Quebec dealership ran real-time valuations with automated SMS follow-up for eight months. Here are the real numbers, including what did not work.
Client name withheld at their request.
What was actually running.
The store integrated a real-time vehicle valuation service into its funnel. When a consumer requested a value on their car, the system captured the contact, returned a real market number, and immediately fired a personalised SMS containing that number and a link to take the next step.
No salesperson touched the lead before that message went out. The entire loop ran unattended, seven days a week.
- 1Consumer requests a value
- 2Contact captured
- 3Real-time valuation returned
- 4Automated SMS sent with their number and a link
- 5Lead lands in the CRM
Eight months of data from one store in one province. It is not a forecast for your rooftop. What it does show is that the mechanic holds up under real volume, month after month, without a rep in the loop.
Eight months, four phases.
| Phase | Months | Leads | Avg/month | What changed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ignition | Jul – Aug 2025 | 234 | 117 | Ten times June's volume. First template live. |
| Acceleration | Sep – Oct 2025 | 517 | 259 | First 200+ month, then the strongest month of 2025. |
| Sustained scale | Nov – Dec 2025 | 491 | 246 | Held around 250 a month with no decay. |
| Peak | Jan – Feb 2026 | 609 | 305 | Best two months of the period. Tracking rebuilt. |
Volume nearly doubled from Q3 to Q4 2025 and never fell back. The channel did not fatigue.
Two markets carried it.
Montréal and Québec City alone accounted for 69.2% of the volume. Density beats coverage. You do not need a province, you need your own market.
These were not junk leads.
The median car in this pipeline was an $18,300 vehicle. That is retail inventory, not auction filler.
Six months of leads nobody could attribute.
For the first six months the outbound message pointed to a generic short link and offered the recipient two ways to respond: click the link, or contact a rep. It produced leads, but there was no way to prove which downstream business came from the message.
In January 2026 the destination was rebuilt with full campaign tracking parameters and the secondary option was removed, leaving one path.
| Jul – Dec 2025 | Jan – Feb 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Destination link | Generic short link | Tracked link with campaign parameters |
| Attribution captured | None | Source, medium and campaign |
| Secondary contact option | Included | Removed |
| Number of calls to action | Two | One |
For six months this campaign produced leads it could not attribute. The volume was real. Nobody could prove which of it turned into business. Fixing the link and cutting the second call to action did not change what the message said, it changed whether the message could be defended in a budget meeting. If you take one thing from this page, take that.
What we would do differently.
Replies went unanswered.
In a reviewed set of 37 conversation threads, four inbound replies were sitting unread. When reply volume is low, every single reply is the whole game.
FixReal-time reply routing and alerting, which is exactly what the Clutched AI agent handles without anyone watching.
No opt-out handling.
A lead replied "Non merci" and nothing happened. There was no keyword suppression and no acknowledgement.
FixAutomatic suppression on STOP, ARRÊT and natural-language opt-outs, before it becomes a compliance problem instead of a UX one.
Almost no email addresses.
Only 5.7% of the 1,852 leads had an email on file. That leaves SMS as the only channel, with no fallback and no retargeting.
FixCapture email at the moment of the valuation, not after.
One language for everyone.
A small English-speaking segment kept receiving French messages.
FixBranch the template on language at send time.
None of these were failures of the valuation mechanic. All four were failures of follow-up. That is precisely the layer Clutched automates.
How these numbers were produced.
- Period: July 1, 2025 to February 28, 2026 (245 days).
- Source: CRM contact and conversation records from the deployment, exported and analysed directly.
- Lead counts, monthly volume, geographic distribution and email coverage come from the full population of 1,852 contacts.
- Vehicle valuation figures come from a reviewed sample of individually verified valuations. Conversation and reply observations come from a reviewed sample of 37 threads. Sample sizes are stated where those figures appear.
- All names, phone numbers, email addresses and identifying details have been removed. The client is not named at their request.
- This describes one deployment, in one market, over one period. It is not a projection of what any individual dealership will produce.
Run the same math on your store.
The mechanic captures sellers who were already on your site, the lead stays in-house instead of walking to CarMax or Carvana, and the SMS agent works it before it cools.
Units / Month
Monthly Gross
Annual Gross
Estimate based on your inputs, not a guarantee.
At $297/month, that pays for itself on the first unit.
See the same mechanic running on your own store.
Self-serve demo. No sales call. Two minutes.