Your CRM already holds the answer to why some leads convert and others vanish. The four numbers worth watching, and what each one tells you when it moves.
Figures in this article describe the wider market and are drawn from the third-party sources listed at the end. They are not Lead Foundry results, and nothing here is a projection of what any individual broker will achieve.
Most brokers look at one number, which is how many deals came from bought leads. It is the number furthest from any lever you can pull, and it arrives last.
Four earlier numbers tell you what is happening while there is still time to change it, and every CRM worth using captures all four without extra work.
| Number | How to calculate it | What it isolates |
|---|---|---|
| Median time to first attempt | Median minutes from lead arrival to first call | Capacity and delivery |
| Contact rate | Share of leads reaching a live conversation within six attempts | Data quality and speed together |
| Average attempts per lead | Total logged attempts divided by leads | Whether the cadence is real |
| Appointment rate | Share of conversations producing a scheduled next step | The first call itself |
Use the median rather than the mean for the first one. A single lead called four days late drags a mean badly and hides an otherwise healthy month.
You are past capacity, or delivery broke. Check delivery first because it is binary and takes a minute. If delivery is fine, you are buying more than you can work, and the fix is fewer leads or more calling time rather than a different supplier.
This is the one signal that genuinely points at the supply. If you called just as fast as last month and fewer people answered, something about the records changed. Query the supplier, ask for source URLs on a sample, and claim replacements against your written criteria.
The cadence has quietly stopped happening, which is what always happens when volume rises and nothing else changes. If this number is near two, no supplier will fix your results: research across close to 3.5 million leads found 93% of converted leads are reached by the sixth attempt.
People are answering and not booking, which is a first-call problem rather than a lead problem. Listen to calls, look at the opening, and check whether you are asking for a specific time or for permission to follow up.
| Converted leads reached by the 6th call | 93% |
|---|---|
| Leads never called a second time | 50% |
| Leads that never receive one email | 59% |
| Reps who stop after a single attempt | 44% |
Average attempts per lead is the number that tells you which of these bars you are living in. It is also the one brokers are most surprised by when they first calculate it.
Source: Velocify contact-strategy research and Salesforce State of Sales
Monthly for the four numbers, against the previous month, in a fixed slot. Quarterly for any decision about a supplier.
The reason for the split is noise. Contact and appointment rates move around across four weeks for reasons that have nothing to do with supply, and a broker who changes supplier after one soft month is reacting to variance. Median time to first attempt is the exception: it is stable enough to act on weekly.
The review that takes ten minutes: Four numbers, this month against last, plus one sentence on what changed. Anything longer will not survive as a habit, and a habit is the only version of this that produces value.
The first of those is the single most useful view a broker can build. It answers, in one chart, the question that otherwise consumes a quarter of argument with a supplier.
Then that is the finding. A system that cannot tell you when a lead arrived and when it was first attempted cannot tell you whether your money is being spent well, and no amount of reporting elsewhere compensates. Automated delivery gives you both timestamps for free; manual entry gives you neither reliably.
Median time from lead arrival to first attempt, contact rate across a full six-attempt cadence, average attempts per lead, and appointment rate from conversations. Together they separate a supply problem from a capacity problem from a first-call problem, which is a distinction revenue alone cannot make.
Look for contact rate falling while your median time to first attempt held steady. That combination points at the records rather than at your process. If contact rate fell and your response time also slipped, you are past capacity, and changing supplier will reproduce the result.
Monthly for the four numbers, in a fixed slot, against the previous month. Quarterly for any decision about changing supplier, because contact and appointment rates are noisy across four weeks. Median time to first attempt is stable enough to watch weekly and degrades before revenue does.
Close to six, since research across close to 3.5 million leads found 93% of converted leads are reached by the sixth attempt. An average near two means the cadence is not being followed, which is the most common and most recoverable cause of poor results from purchased supply.