The full chain from the moment a consumer searches to the moment a record lands in your CRM, and the four points along it where quality is decided.
A purchased lead is a manufactured product. It has a supply chain, a set of inputs, and a small number of points where somebody decided how much care to take. Brokers evaluate the finished record, which is the one part of the chain that reveals almost nothing about how it was made.
This walks the chain end to end. The point is to give you the vocabulary to ask a supplier about stages you cannot see, because those are the stages that decide whether the number you dial is answered.
Every insurance or mortgage lead sold in New Zealand and Australia passes through the same five stages, whether the seller describes it that way or not. The differences between a good supplier and a lead mill are entirely differences in how each stage is run.
| Stage | What happens | Who usually controls it |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Demand capture | A consumer searches, sees an ad, or lands on a comparison page | Whoever buys the media |
| 2. Landing page and form | The consumer reads a page and decides what to type | Whoever owns the domain |
| 3. Submission | The record is created with whatever fields the form asked for | The form builder |
| 4. Verification | The contact details are tested, or they are not | The operator, if anyone |
| 5. Delivery | The record reaches a broker by API, CRM push, email or CSV | The operator |
Stages one, three and five are visible to a buyer who asks. Stages two and four are the ones that decide quality, and they are the two a lead mill will describe in the vaguest language available.
The landing page sets the consumer expectation that you inherit. A page that says "compare life cover from New Zealand insurers" produces a person who expects a call about life cover. A page that says "check if you qualify for a government payout" produces a person who expects free money and reacts badly to a broker.
This is the mechanism behind most complaints about bought leads. The broker calls a person who is genuinely interested in something, just not the thing the broker is selling. Nothing about the record on the screen reveals the mismatch. The only way to know is to look at the page.
The question that settles it: Ask the supplier to send you the URL of the page the enquiry came from. Not a description of it, the live URL. An operator who owns the brand will send it in the same reply. An operator buying traffic from a network often cannot, because they do not know.
Where the operator owns the consumer brand, the wording of the form is a decision they made and can defend. Where the operator is buying enquiries from an affiliate network, the wording was chosen by somebody paid on volume, and the incentive runs in exactly the wrong direction.
Verification is the stage with the widest gap between what the word implies and what suppliers do. Four different checks all get sold under the same label, and they test very different things.
| Check | What it proves | What it cannot prove |
|---|---|---|
| Format validation | The number has the right number of digits | That the number belongs to anyone |
| Line lookup | The number is allocated and active | That the person who typed it owns it |
| Email confirmation loop | Someone opened an inbox and clicked | That the phone number is right |
| SMS one-time code at submission | A person holding that handset was present and completed the form | Their intent to buy |
Only the last one closes the loop between the person and the number. A one-time code sent during the form flow, which the consumer has to type back before the enquiry completes, means the handset was in their hand at the moment of enquiry. Every other check tests the string, not the human.
| Typos and malformed numbers | Format check |
|---|---|
| Disconnected and unallocated lines | Line lookup |
| Fake and abandoned addresses | Email loop |
| Numbers the enquirer does not hold | SMS code |
| A consumer who never wanted the call | Nothing screens this |
The gates are cumulative and ordered. A supplier running only the first two has screened for typos and dead lines, which is worth something, and has not established that a reachable person exists.
Delivery latency changes the value of the record, because the value of a lead decays fast. 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 the odds of contacting a lead drop by a factor of 100 between a 5 minute and a 30 minute response.
A lead delivered by API into your CRM, triggering an immediate task, is a different product from the same record emailed as a CSV attachment at the end of the day, even though the fields are identical.
Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker as firms that tried to contact the customer even an hour later.
Harvard Business Review, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads
These questions map onto the five stages. A supplier who runs a clean process answers all of them in one conversation, because the answers are facts about their own business rather than positions to be negotiated.
How Lead Foundry answers this: Our enquiries come from QuoteHub, which we own outright. The domain is checkable on the New Zealand Business Number register. Verification is an SMS code inside the form flow, so the record does not exist unless the handset answered. Delivery is straight into your CRM, and each enquiry goes to one broker.
An operator who owns the consumer brand carries the cost of building it and captures the benefit of every improvement they make to the page. An operator reselling enquiries from a network carries neither. That difference in ownership produces a difference in behaviour that shows up on your phone months later.
It also decides what happens when something goes wrong. When a broker reports that a set of enquiries were poor, an operator who owns the page can look at the page, change the wording, and fix the cause. An operator who bought the traffic can only apologise and buy from a different network next week.
An insurance lead is generated when a consumer arrives on a landing page, usually from a search result or an ad, reads the offer, and submits a form with their contact details and their situation. The operator then verifies the contact details to some standard and delivers the record to a broker by API, CRM integration, email or CSV. Quality is decided mainly by the wording of the page and by whether the phone number was verified at the point of submission.
It depends entirely on the supplier, because the term is not regulated. It can mean the phone number passed a format check, that the line is allocated, that an email was confirmed, or that the consumer entered a one-time SMS code during the form flow. Only the last of these establishes that a real person holding that handset completed the enquiry. Ask a supplier which specific test they run and at what point in the process.
You should be able to. Ask the supplier for the live URL of the page the enquiry was submitted on. An operator who owns their consumer brand can send it immediately. An operator buying enquiries from an affiliate network frequently cannot, which is itself the answer to the question you were asking.
In seconds, by an automated delivery into the system you work from. The MIT Sloan lead response research found the odds of contacting a lead fall by a factor of 100 between a five minute and a thirty minute response, so any delivery method that adds minutes of latency is spending your conversion rate before you have touched the record.