The short answer
Cost per lead and cost per funded deal move in opposite directions more often than brokers expect. A shared lead at a third of the price stops being cheaper the moment it takes three times as many to fund one deal, and becomes the expensive option if it takes four times as many — which is the usual outcome once the same merchant is being called by five brokers.
Every broker knows cost per funded deal is the real number and most still buy on cost per lead, because one is on the invoice and the other takes a quarter to measure. It is worth doing the arithmetic once, because the ranking flips.
There are two numbers, not one. Cost per funded deal is the money; time and effort per funded deal is the hours of dialling behind each deal, and it is where the cheapest data of all, a UCC list at cents a record, loses most. Alex’s rule from years of selling leads is that cheap leads are usually not actually cheap. A broker who boasts of a $10 lead tends to be back within weeks, because the leads did not fund.
Same $3,000, different lead types
What actually degrades on a cheap lead
- Contact rate, because the number was never verified and may not be a working mobile.
- Receptiveness, because you are the fourth broker to call about the same form.
- Qualification, because a lead sold at $12 cannot afford to throw away the traffic that fails screening.
- Rep morale, which is not a line item and shows up in dial counts within a fortnight.
When cheap is genuinely right
A floor with idle capacity, a rep-heavy cost structure and a disciplined follow-up process can make shared or aged data work, because their marginal cost of a dial is close to zero and volume is the constraint they can relieve cheaply. That is a real strategy and worth naming — cheap leads are the wrong buy for most brokers, not for all of them.
We sell shared MCA leads at $40 per lead and aged MCA leads at $0.35 per lead as well as exclusive, and the same arithmetic applies to ours: run it with your own funded rate before deciding which one fits your floor.
The wrong version is buying cheap because the invoice is smaller and then working the list exactly as you would have worked an expensive one. That combination gets the worst of both.