Shared leads look cheaper on the invoice. Run them through to a settled deal and the exclusive lead usually wins. The mechanism, and how to test it on your own book.
The argument for shared leads is always price. They cost a fraction of an exclusive lead, so on the invoice they look like the smart purchase. The argument weakens the moment you count how many you need to fund one deal, and it collapses when you look at what happens to a shared record in the first ten minutes of its life.
It is rarely that the people are lower quality. It is what happens to them after they submit.
The first two are the same mechanism seen from different angles, and it is a timing mechanism rather than a quality one.
More than most brokers estimate. The Lead Response Management study run by Dr James Oldroyd at MIT Sloan analysed more than 15,000 leads and over 100,000 call attempts and found that the odds of contacting a lead called at five minutes versus thirty minutes drop by a factor of 100, and the odds of qualifying it drop by a factor of 21.
Harvard Business Review found the same shape across 1.25 million leads from 42 companies: firms responding within an hour were roughly seven times more likely to have a meaningful conversation with a decision maker, and 60 times more likely than those waiting a day or more.
The compounding penalty: A shared lead punishes you twice. Your contact rate falls because somebody called first, and the person who does answer is in a price-shopping frame because they know they are being chased. Exclusive supply removes both at once.
This is the comparison the invoice hides. An exclusive lead typically costs three to five times more per record. The number of records required to produce one settled deal usually differs by more than that, which is what flips the ranking.
| What you compare | Shared | Exclusive |
|---|---|---|
| Price per record | Lowest | Three to five times higher |
| Who else is calling this person | Several brokers, often within minutes | Nobody |
| What decides whether you connect | Dial speed against other buyers | Your own response time |
| Records needed per settled deal | Many | Materially fewer |
| Adviser hours consumed per settled deal | Highest, because most calls go nowhere | Lower |
| Cost per settled deal | Usually higher | Usually lower |
The row most brokers omit is adviser hours. For a solo adviser or a small firm, calling capacity is the binding constraint, so a model that consumes more hours per settled deal is expensive in the resource you have least of, whatever the invoice says.
Do not take a supplier's word for it, or this article's. Your speed, your script and your market all move the result, so run the comparison on your own numbers.
Running them in the same week is the part brokers skip and the part that matters most. Sequential tests compare two suppliers plus every seasonal, personal and market variable that changed in between, which is not a comparison of suppliers at all.
There is a narrow case, and it is worth stating plainly. A firm with a dedicated calling team, a power dialler, and a genuine tolerance for low contact rates can make shared supply work as a volume business. The economics reward speed and headcount, and some operations have both.
For a solo adviser or a small brokerage, the maths rarely works, because every call that goes nowhere is an hour that does not come back and there is no second caller to absorb it. For most advisers the exclusive record is the rational purchase: you pay more for the record and less for the result.
An exclusive lead is sold to one broker only. A shared lead is sold to several brokers at once, all of whom receive the same consumer's details and call them. The practical difference is that shared supply makes contact a race decided in minutes, while exclusive supply means your contact rate depends only on your own response time.
For most brokers, yes. Exclusive records typically cost three to five times more per lead, and usually require enough fewer records per settled deal that the cost per client comes out lower. They also consume far fewer adviser hours per settled deal, which matters most for solo advisers and small firms where calling capacity is the binding constraint.
Because several brokers call the same person within minutes, and the research on response time is unforgiving. The MIT Sloan study found contact odds fall by a factor of 100 between a five minute and a thirty minute response. Most buyers of a shared record are not the first caller, so they are working a person who has already spoken to somebody.
Ask consumers on the call whether other brokers have contacted them, and check the supply agreement for whether exclusivity is permanent or a time-limited window. A rolling window means the record can return to a saleable pool once it expires, which produces the same consumer experience as shared supply on a delay.