The common beliefs about bought leads that quietly cost brokers money, and what the published evidence actually says about each.
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 of what brokers believe about bought leads is inherited from other brokers, and the beliefs that cost the most money are the ones that sound most like common sense.
The invoice is the smallest cost of working a lead. A properly worked record consumes around 35 minutes across a six-attempt cadence, and Salesforce research puts the share of a sales professional's time spent actively selling at around 40%.
So a cheap record with a low contact rate spends the same scarce hour and produces fewer conversations. Once time is in the model, low-contact-rate supply is routinely the more expensive option for a capacity-constrained broker.
The Velocify research across close to 3.5 million leads found that 93% of leads that eventually convert are reached by the sixth call attempt, and that more than half of prospects who eventually convert are reached after the first attempt. It also found that 50% of leads are never called a second time.
People are busy, screen unknown numbers, and forget. Interest and answering are weakly related, and treating them as the same thing discards most of the pipeline.
The MIT Sloan lead response study, covering more than 15,000 leads and over 100,000 call attempts, found the odds of contacting a lead fall by a factor of 100 between a five minute and a thirty minute response, and the odds of qualifying it fall by a factor of 21.
Harvard Business Review, auditing 1.25 million leads, found firms responding within an hour were 60 times more likely to have a meaningful conversation than firms waiting more than a day. The same audit found an average first response time of 42 hours across the firms it studied, which is why the benchmark is so beatable.
Verified is not a regulated term. It covers a format check, a line lookup, an email confirmation loop, and an SMS code completed inside the form flow, and only the last establishes that a person holding that handset made the enquiry.
Paying a premium for verification without asking which check it refers to is the most common way a quality budget buys nothing.
Contact and appointment rates are noisy across four weeks. A month is not enough signal to judge supply, which is why the useful discipline is reviewing the four operating numbers monthly and making supplier decisions quarterly.
The diagnostic that replaces the belief: Split last month's leads by how fast you first called them and compare contact rates. If the fast group performs much better, the variable that moved was yours. It takes ten minutes and settles most arguments about supply.
It has a duration, and the duration is where the money is. A rolling 30 or 90 day window means the record returns to a saleable pool when it expires, producing the same consumer experience as shared supply on a delay. Ask whether exclusivity is permanent and get the answer into the agreement.
Not automatically, but the comparison has to include adviser time. A properly worked lead consumes around 35 minutes across six attempts regardless of what it cost, so a cheap record with a low contact rate spends the same scarce hour for fewer conversations. Contact rate moves the cost-per-client model more than unit price does.
No. Research across close to 3.5 million leads found 93% of leads that convert are reached by the sixth call attempt, and that more than half of eventual contacts happen after the first attempt. Half of all purchased leads are never called a second time, which is where most of the loss occurs.
Yes. The MIT Sloan research found contact odds drop by a factor of 100 between a five minute and a thirty minute response, and Harvard Business Review found firms responding within an hour were 60 times more likely to have a meaningful conversation than those waiting more than a day.
Two to three weeks and 30 to 50 leads gives a reliable read on contact rate and data accuracy. Judging profitability needs a full sales cycle and well over 100 records. Making supplier decisions on a single month of conversion data is reacting to variance rather than to performance.