I spent last week pulling six months of data on 7 of our top shops.
They're spread across California, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Ohio, and together they generated almost 10,000 leads. I went in expecting the obvious story, that the shops spending the most would be getting the most, and the data told me something else entirely.
The biggest spender finished second to last in total leads. A smaller spender finished second. And the top shop pulled 60% more leads while spending 65% less than the big spender did. Budget is not the lever everybody thinks it is.
Here's the part that surprised me even more. Five states, completely different markets, completely different playbooks, and every single shop lands between $38 and $72 for a lead. Different worlds, same price tag. The market has already agreed on what a customer costs, so the game isn't finding some magic cheap channel. The game is what your machine does with the lead once you've paid for it.
Which brings me to the phone. Across all seven shops, phone calls drove 23% more leads than their websites, Facebook, and Instagram combined. And a phone call isn't just another lead. It's the hottest one you'll ever get, a person holding your number, ready to book. It's also the channel almost nobody tracks, times, or trains their team on, which means most shops are sending their best money straight to voicemail.
There's an AI story in the data too. Google's AI answered customers directly and cited our shops as the expert 110 times over the window, but it didn't spread the mentions around. Three shops took 85% of them, and the pattern behind who gets picked is teaching. The shops publishing how-to content, how long tint lasts, ceramic versus PPF, get quoted almost exactly in line with how much they teach. The shop that spent $100K on ads and taught nothing got zero mentions. You can't buy your way into the answer box. You earn it.
And the number one shop ties all of it together. Over 700 videos filmed. Four channels running, with no single one carrying more than 30% of their leads, so one algorithm change can't take them down. Every ring treated like gold. While the rest of the industry argues about ads, this shop documents everything they do, and their lead line just climbs, month after month, while everyone else spikes and crashes.
I walked through all of it on camera, the spend charts, the AI citations, the monthly lead lines, so you can see the data instead of taking my word for it.
It'll probably change what you spend your next marketing dollar on.
And if you want to look at your full sales process from first contact to close, book a free strategy session at detailinggrowth.com.
-Gabe Fletcher
Founder - Detailing Growth