When the founder first started Elevate Marketing, he thought the biggest wins for car detailing companies would come from generating brand-new leads.

And while new leads are important, he quickly realized something most contractors completely overlook:

Every Car Detailing business is sitting on a goldmine of old leads they’ve already paid for.

Quotes that never closed. Estimates that got put on hold. Customers who said, “Maybe later.”

Those names, phone numbers, and emails were just sitting in databases, costing money but producing nothing.

The First Time We Tried It

One of Tim’s early clients had over 1,200 dormant leads sitting untouched in their CRM.

These were people the company had already spent thousands of dollars to acquire, but they’d gone cold after weeks or months of no follow-up.

Tim set up the Reactivation Play—a simple 3-day automated SMS and email sequence that did three things:

- Reached out with urgency (“limited free system assessments available this week”).

- Removed risk (“no cost, no obligation assessment”).

- Created scarcity (“only the first 10 Car Owners will be scheduled”).

- The client was skeptical. "Nobody's going to answer," they said. But within hours, the responses started flooding in.

Why It Works:

The beauty of the Reactivation Play is simple:

Business owners already spent thousands to generate these leads.

Most never followed up consistently after the first estimate.

A little automation plus the right messaging brings them back to life.