The short answer
Set a daily cap that matches what your floor can dial within five minutes, and a delivery window covering the hours you are actually staffed. Fifty leads over ten business days is five a day and gets worked; the same fifty in two days arrives into a queue, and the ones at the back get the contact rate of an aged list you paid a premium for.
Pacing is the cheapest lever in lead buying and the one brokers most often leave at the default. It costs nothing, any competent vendor supports it, and it decides what proportion of an order gets the speed that makes it worth its price.
Two settings
| Setting | Set it to |
|---|---|
| Daily cap | What your floor dials inside five minutes, not what it can eventually process |
| Delivery window | The hours you are genuinely staffed, in the merchant’s time zone |
Those two are the whole of it, and the second is the one people get wrong. A lead delivered at 7pm to a floor that finishes at 6 is dialled the next morning at best — it is a fresh lead that arrives aged, at the fresh price.
Match pacing to capacity, not to impatience
- Work out sustainable new leads per rep per day, with the follow-up book counted.
- Multiply by reps who are actually dialling, not headcount.
- That is your cap. Ordering faster does not produce deals faster.
- Revisit it when you hire, and when your cadence changes.
The temptation is always to get the order in quickly, because a bought order sitting undelivered feels like money doing nothing. It is doing considerably less nothing than an order sitting in a queue unworked.