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"Real time" is a claim about latency that almost nobody quantifies. Since the whole economic argument for exclusive leads rests on calling within five minutes, 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 |
| 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.
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.
Questions brokers ask
What does real-time lead delivery mean?
That the record is forwarded to your system the moment the merchant submits, with seconds between the form and your CRM. The phrase is also used loosely for hourly batches and CSV drops, so ask about the mechanism rather than the adjective.
How fast should a lead reach my CRM?
Seconds, by webhook. Ask for the median measured over the last month rather than a promise — a vendor with genuine webhook delivery can answer that precisely.
Why does delivery delay matter so much?
Because the argument for exclusive leads rests on calling within about five minutes. A fifteen-minute delivery delay does not shorten your window slightly, it removes most of it, and the contact rate difference is large.
What should a lead payload contain?
The full contact record, the qualification answers, the attribution data, and the merchant’s own submission timestamp. That last field is what lets you measure your time to first dial honestly.
Is fast delivery enough on its own?
No. A lead delivered in two seconds into a CRM nobody is watching is a slow lead. Delivery speed only pays if an alert, an assignment and a dial follow it.
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.