Every supplier says exclusive. The word has at least four meanings in this market. How to pin down which one you are being sold, and how to test it afterwards.
Exclusive is the most-used and least-defined word in lead buying. Four different arrangements are all described with it, and the differences between them are worth more than the price difference between suppliers.
| Version | What it means | The question that reveals it |
|---|---|---|
| Permanent exclusivity | Sold once, never resold | Is that written in the agreement? |
| Windowed exclusivity | Exclusive for a stated period, then resaleable | What happens when the period ends? |
| Scoped exclusivity | Exclusive within one product or region only | Could this consumer be sold to anyone else, for anything? |
| Concurrent, described as exclusive | Sold to several buyers at once | How many buyers receive this record? |
The first three are legitimate commercial arrangements that a broker can price. The fourth is a misrepresentation, and under the Fair Trading Act 1986 a trader must hold reasonable grounds for a representation at the time it is made, with trader intent being irrelevant.
The clause to read twice: Silence about what happens after an exclusivity window is not a promise that nothing happens. Get the answer written in, because a term you were told on a call is a term that can be remembered differently later.
There is no technical way to verify exclusivity from the record itself, so the test is conversational and it works.
Ask every consumer you reach whether anyone else has been in touch about their enquiry. Log the answer as a field. Across thirty or forty records the pattern is unambiguous, and it is evidence you can put in front of a supplier rather than an impression.
It buys the removal of a race you would frequently lose. 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. On concurrent supply, the brokers who are not first are working a person who has already spoken to somebody.
For a capacity-constrained broker that matters twice over, because a shared record consumes the same 35 minutes of cadence with a materially lower chance of producing a conversation.
How Lead Foundry answers this: Each enquiry goes to one broker, and there is no period after which that changes. You can see the source brand on every record, so the supply chain behind it is visible rather than described.
Ask three questions before buying: is exclusivity permanent or expressed as a number of days, what happens to the record when any period ends, and could the same consumer be supplied to another buyer for a different product. Then test it afterwards by asking every consumer you reach whether anyone else has been in touch, logged as a structured field.
It has at least four meanings in this market: sold once and never resold, exclusive for a stated window then resaleable, exclusive within one product line or region only, or sold concurrently to several buyers while being described as exclusive. Only the last is a misrepresentation; the others are arrangements you can price if you know which one you have.
If exclusivity was expressed as a window, yes, and nothing in the contract is breached when it expires. That is the most common mechanism behind recycled leads. Ask whether exclusivity is permanent and get the answer written into the supply agreement rather than given on a call.
It removes a contact race decided in minutes. The MIT Sloan research found contact odds fall by a factor of 100 between a five minute and a thirty minute response, so on shared supply most buyers are working a consumer who has already spoken to another broker, having paid the same time cost to get there.