Switching From a Firm Offer Tool: From 10 Leads a Month to Five Deals a Week

• A Toyota store went from 8 to 10 website trade leads a month with an instant cash offer tool to close to 100 leads in some months after switching to MOTO(convert).

• The leads from the old tool closed nothing. After the switch, the GM says the store is closing about a deal a day, around five deals a week.

• Mike sees instant cash offer and firm offer tools as a hangover from the COVID era. The offers are generally low, so customers do not answer when your team calls.

• Clunky flows that send shoppers to another page and a rigorous process on their phone cause people to bounce before they become a lead.

• According to Mike, dealers that switch from an instant cash offer tool to MOTO(acquire) are seeing lead counts go up 3x, 5x, even 10x.

A lot of dealers are still running a firm offer or instant cash offer tool on their website and wondering why it barely produces trade-in leads, let alone deals. If that sounds like your store, switching from a firm offer tool may be the simplest fix available to you. I recently sat with the GM of a Toyota store in the Midwest that made that switch a few months ago, and what he shared is worth passing along.

What happened after switching from a firm offer tool

A few months ago, this store replaced the instant cash offer tool on its website with MOTO(convert), our website trade tool. With the old tool, they were getting 8 to 10 leads per month through their website. After the switch, in some months they got close to 100 leads in one month.

That is about 10 times more leads, and what they changed was a script on their website. Same store, same team, a different tool doing the work.

Lead count is only half the story. When I met with the GM, he told me that on those 8 to 10 leads per month from the old trade tool, they closed nothing. No deals. With MOTO(acquire), he said they are closing about a deal a day. In his words: "We're closing around five or so deals a week."

That is the number a used car manager cares about. More leads are nice, but leads your team can actually work and close are what put cars on the lot.

Why are instant cash offer tools producing so few trade-in leads?

There are still a lot of dealers using instant cash offer and firm offer tools on their website. In my view, that is a hangover from the COVID times. Those tools bloomed when people were sitting at home and needed to get an offer without coming into the store. It made sense then.

Right now, they run into real problems:

• The offers are generally low. When a customer gets a low number, they are not going to answer your phone call. The lead looks like an opportunity in the CRM, but nobody picks up.

• The experience is clunky. A shopper goes to your website and says, okay, I want a value. They click the tool, it takes them to another page, and then it is a really rigorous process on their phone. So people bounce.

Put those together and you get what this Toyota store had: a trickle of leads, and the few that came in did not turn into deals.

How to get more trade-in leads from your website

Every dealer that switches over from an instant cash offer tool to MOTO(acquire) is seeing big increases in lead counts. Some dealers 3x, some 5x, some 10x. The common thread is user experience: make it easy for a shopper to see what their vehicle is worth, right where they already are.

If you want to pressure test your current setup, start here:

1. Open your website on your phone and try to get a trade value the way a shopper would. Count the pages and form fields between "I want a value" and actually seeing a number.

2. Pull your lead-to-deal numbers for your trade tool over the last few months. If leads come in and nothing closes, that tells you something about the conversation the tool is starting.

3. Ask your team how often trade tool customers actually answer the phone. If the answer is "rarely," look hard at the offers your tool is putting in front of people.

It is time to abandon that old strategy from, well, now six years ago and improve the user experience, so your team gets more opportunities to work and ultimately closes more deals.

Where MOTO(convert) fits

MOTO(convert) is the website trade tool this store switched to. It is a website trade tool with instant valuations, firm offer requests, and monthly value tracking, and it includes the free buying power tool.

That means a shopper who wants a firm offer can still request one, while a shopper who just wants to know what their vehicle is worth can get a value without being pushed through a long process first. For more on how dealers are approaching this decision, see our videos on firm offer tools and alternatives.