The short answer
Real time should mean the record is forwarded to your system the moment the merchant submits, with seconds between the form and your CRM. In practice the phrase also gets used for hourly batches, for CSV drops, and for records that were generated in real time and delivered later — so the question to ask is not whether it is real time but what the delivery mechanism is and what the median delay measures.
"Real time" is a claim about latency that almost nobody quantifies. Since the whole economic argument for exclusive leads rests on calling within sixty seconds, the latency is not a detail — it is most of the product.
| What is offered | Typical delay | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Webhook POST on submit | Seconds | Nothing — this is the standard |
| API poll every 15 minutes | Up to 15 minutes | The best window, partially |
| Hourly batch to email | Up to an hour | Most of the window |
| Daily CSV | Up to a day | The window entirely |
| Rows in a Google Sheet | Seconds to arrive, then whenever someone looks | Usually the window entirely |
| Portal you log into | Whenever you look | Unpredictable, usually worst |
Ask for the median, not the promise
The useful question is "what is the median time between a merchant pressing submit and the record arriving in my CRM, measured over last month?" A vendor with webhook delivery can answer in seconds. A vendor who answers with an adjective is describing an intention.
What a webhook delivery should include
- A POST to a URL you supply, in the JSON shape your CRM expects.
- A test lead before anything real, so you confirm it landed in the right fields.
- Retries on failure, so an outage on your side does not silently lose records.
- A timestamp of the merchant’s submission, not just of the delivery.
- A fallback — email and a live sheet — for whatever your CRM cannot take. A backup copy, not the place reps work from.
The submission timestamp is the one to insist on. Without it you cannot measure your own time to first dial honestly, which means you cannot tell a slow vendor from a slow floor — and that is the single most common unresolved argument in this market.