A lead process that lives in one person's head degrades under pressure. A one-page SOP, and the four numbers that prove it is working.
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.
Ask a broker what happens when a lead arrives and you get a description of what usually happens on a good day. Ask what happened to the eleven leads that arrived during last Tuesday's client meetings and the description stops matching the record.
An SOP closes that gap. It is one page, it takes an afternoon, and it is the difference between a process and a habit.
It fails under load. When four leads arrive on a quiet morning, an undocumented process works fine, because the broker has time to make good decisions about each one. When fourteen arrive across a week with two settlement deadlines in it, the undocumented process reverts to whatever is easiest, which is calling the newest lead once and deferring the rest.
The result is that supplier quality and broker capacity get confused. The leads from the busy week convert worse, and the supplier gets the blame for a variance the broker introduced.
Four elements do most of the work. Everything else is refinement.
| Element | The rule | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | Every lead has a named owner at the moment it arrives | An unowned lead is nobody's emergency |
| First contact SLA | First attempt within a stated number of minutes | Contact odds decay by the minute, not by the day |
| Cadence | A fixed sequence of attempts across channels and days | Removes the decision from a tired person |
| Stopping rule | A defined point at which the lead moves to nurture | Stops good effort going into dead records |
Assignment happens automatically at delivery, not by a person triaging a shared inbox. If your supplier can push a lead into your CRM with an owner and a task attached, that step is already solved. If leads arrive by email into a shared address, ownership is the first thing you will lose on a busy day.
Set it in minutes. 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, so an SLA expressed in hours has already conceded most of the available advantage.
Six attempts, spread across roughly a fortnight, mixing phone with a short message. The Velocify research found 93% of converted leads are reached by the sixth attempt, that six calls scheduled across a 15 day period improved contact rates by 110%, and that prospects who are also emailed are 16% more likely to be reached by phone while 59% never receive a single email.
After the sixth attempt without contact, the lead moves to a long-cycle nurture rather than staying in the active queue. The same research found leads needing more than seven calls are 45% less likely to convert, so the seventh attempt is where persistence stops being an investment.
| Day | Attempt | Channel |
|---|---|---|
| Day 0, within minutes | 1 | Phone, then SMS if no answer |
| Day 0, later | 2 | Phone at a different time of day |
| Day 1 | 3 | Phone, then a short email |
| Day 3 | 4 | Phone |
| Day 7 | 5 | Phone, then SMS |
| Day 14 | 6 | Phone, then a closing message that leaves the door open |
The pattern matters more than the exact days. Attempts cluster early because that is when contact odds are highest, then spread out because a person who has not answered five times is unlikely to answer a sixth call an hour later.
These are diagnostic rather than decorative. Each one isolates a different failure.
The one that catches the most: Average attempts per lead. Half of all purchased leads are never called a second time. If your average sits near two, your supplier is not your problem and no change of supplier will fix it.
Review the four numbers monthly, in a fixed slot, against the previous month. An SOP with no review cadence decays back into habit within a quarter, usually without anyone noticing, because each individual shortcut is defensible on the day it is taken.
The other half is making the compliant path the easy path. If following the cadence requires remembering to set six reminders manually, it will not survive contact with a busy fortnight. If the CRM creates the sequence on arrival, it will.
Call within minutes, from a system that assigned the lead to a named owner automatically. If there is no answer, follow a fixed six-attempt cadence across roughly a fortnight that mixes phone with short messages, and record every attempt. The research is consistent that speed to first attempt and total attempt count are the two variables under your control that move contact rate most.
Six attempts is the evidence-backed stopping point. Research across close to 3.5 million leads found 93% of leads that convert are reached by the sixth call, and leads needing more than seven calls are 45% less likely to convert. After six, move the record to a long-cycle nurture rather than keeping it in the active queue.
Median time from lead arrival to first attempt, contact rate, average attempts per lead, and appointment rate from conversations. Together they separate a supplier problem from a capacity problem from a script problem, which is the distinction most brokers cannot make from revenue alone.
You need something that assigns an owner, creates the follow-up sequence automatically, and timestamps every attempt. A CRM is the usual way to get that. A spreadsheet can work for very low volume, but it will not survive the busy week that the SOP exists to protect you from.