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Most shops that dial slowly are not careless. Their leads land somewhere nobody is watching, and by the time anyone looks the merchant has taken three other calls.
Take delivery by webhook
How a lead arrives sets the floor on how old it is when a rep sees it. Everything else in this article is downstream of this choice.
| Method | Age on arrival |
|---|---|
| Webhook POST | Seconds |
| API poll | Minutes, depending on interval |
| Email notification | Minutes to hours, depending who is watching |
| CSV batch | Hours to days |
| Portal login | However long until someone checks |
A good vendor shapes their payload to the fields your CRM already expects rather than making you rebuild your intake, and pushes a test record through before any real ones so you can confirm the mapping.
Assign on arrival, to a person
A lead assigned to "the team" is assigned to nobody. Round-robin to a named rep at the moment of creation, with a fallback that reassigns if the first rep does not action it.
- Assign on creation, not on first open.
- Reassign automatically after five minutes of no activity.
- Route by availability where you can, so leads do not queue behind someone on a call.
- Never let a lead sit unowned overnight — either staff the window or cap delivery to hours you cover.
Alert in a way that interrupts
Instrument it so you can see the problem
- Timestamp lead creation and first outbound attempt on every record. Without both, none of this is measurable.
- Report the median time to first dial weekly, per rep. Median, not mean — one weekend batch drags an average and hides the picture.
- Break it down by hour of day. Most floors have a gap at open and after close where leads sit.
- Tag every lead with its source, permanently. It is what lets you compare vendors on cost per funded deal, and it is what makes duplicate detection possible later.
That last one costs nothing today and is impossible to reconstruct retroactively. If you take one thing from this, make it source tagging.
Questions brokers ask
How should MCA leads be delivered into a CRM?
By webhook POST, so records arrive within seconds of submission. API polling is acceptable if the interval is short; email notifications, CSV batches and portal logins all mean the lead is minutes to days old before a rep sees it, which is the largest controllable factor in whether it funds.
How do you route leads so they actually get called?
Assign to a named rep at the moment of creation rather than into a shared queue, alert with something that interrupts — push or SMS rather than email — and reassign automatically if nothing happens within five minutes. A lead assigned to "the team" is assigned to nobody.
How do you measure time to first dial?
Timestamp lead creation and first outbound attempt on every record, then report the median weekly, per rep, broken down by hour of day. Use the median rather than the mean, because one weekend batch will drag an average and conceal the pattern.
Why does source tagging matter?
It is what lets you compare vendors on cost per funded deal rather than cost per lead, and it is the prerequisite for detecting duplicate records sold by two vendors both claiming exclusivity. It costs nothing to start today and cannot be reconstructed for leads already received.
What if leads arrive outside business hours?
Either staff that window or cap delivery to the hours you actually cover. A lead that arrives at 6am into an empty office is not a fast lead, it is a stale one by nine. Most vendors will throttle delivery to your hours and timezone if you ask.
Alex Makowski
Founder, Infinite Bookings
Runs the lead generation operation behind Infinite Bookings — paid traffic, the funding application, and the delivery pipeline that puts records into brokers’ CRMs.
Reachable directly at alex@infinitebookings.com or 732-609-7182.