How a lead reaches you sets how fast you call it. The four delivery methods, ranked by the minutes each one quietly costs your contact rate.
Two suppliers can sell identical records and produce very different results, because one of them hands you the enquiry while the consumer still has the browser open and the other one emails it to you.
This ranks the four delivery methods in use across New Zealand and Australia by the only measure that matters, which is how many minutes each one inserts between a consumer pressing submit and a broker pressing dial.
Because the contactability of a lead decays on a curve far steeper than most brokers assume. The Lead Response Management study, run by Dr James Oldroyd at MIT Sloan with data covering more than 15,000 leads and over 100,000 call attempts, 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 pattern at a coarser resolution 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 than those responding an hour later, and 60 times more likely than firms waiting 24 hours or more.
The decay is the point: Those studies were not measuring effort. Every firm in them eventually called. What separated the results was elapsed minutes, which is exactly the variable your delivery method controls and your sales skill does not.
| Method | How it works | Typical latency | Fails when |
|---|---|---|---|
| API push | The supplier posts the record straight into your CRM as it is created | Seconds | Your CRM endpoint is down and nobody monitors retries |
| Webhook to automation | The supplier fires an event your automation tool routes and assigns | Seconds to a minute | The automation silently stops and nobody notices |
| CRM native integration | A prebuilt connector between the supplier and a named CRM | Seconds to minutes | The connector polls on a schedule rather than pushing |
| Email or CSV | A message or attachment arrives in a shared inbox | Minutes to a full day | Anybody is in a meeting, which is most of the day |
The distinction that matters is push versus poll versus human. A pushed record arrives without anyone doing anything. A polled record waits for the next scheduled check. An emailed record waits for a person, and people are in meetings.
Email delivery looks acceptable because the email itself arrives quickly. The failure is downstream. The record now needs a human to see the notification, open it, read it, decide who owns it, copy the details into the CRM, and start calling. Each of those steps is a place where the lead waits.
It is also the delivery method most likely to lose a record entirely. A pushed record that fails leaves an error in a log somebody can check. An email that gets filed under a rule, buried by a busy morning, or sent to an adviser who is on leave produces no signal at all. You find out at the end of the month when the numbers are short.
Delivery capability is one of the easier things to establish on a first call, because the answers are technical facts rather than opinions.
How Lead Foundry answers this: Enquiries are delivered into your CRM as they are verified, so the record and the task exist before you would have finished reading an email. Failed deliveries retry and surface as an alert rather than disappearing.
A record arriving in a CRM is only half the job. If nothing tells a specific person that a specific lead is theirs and is live right now, the record sits in a list and the clock runs. The delivery that actually protects your contact rate creates an owned, time-stamped task with a notification attached.
This is also what makes measurement possible. Once every lead has an arrival timestamp and a first-attempt timestamp, your median time-to-first-call becomes a number you can watch, which turns delivery from a matter of belief into a matter of record.
An automated push straight into the system you work from, whether that is an API integration, a webhook into your automation tool, or a native CRM connector that pushes rather than polls. The delivery should create an assigned task with a notification, not just a record in a list. Email and CSV delivery insert human latency at the exact point where the response-time research says latency is most expensive.
The MIT Sloan lead response research found the odds of contacting a lead drop by a factor of 100 between a five minute and a thirty minute response, and the odds of qualifying it drop by a factor of 21. Harvard Business Review found firms responding within an hour were 60 times more likely to have a meaningful conversation than firms waiting more than a day. A delivery method that adds thirty minutes is spending most of the value of the record.
As a secondary notification alongside an automated push, yes. As the primary delivery method it makes your contact rate a function of who happens to be at their desk. If a supplier can only deliver by email or CSV, that tells you something about how much of their product engineering has gone into the part after the sale.
Under five minutes is the benchmark the research supports, and the reason delivery method matters so much is that it decides whether five minutes is even physically available to you. If the record takes twenty minutes to reach a human, the fastest broker alive cannot hit the benchmark.