Thirteen questions to ask any lead vendor.

Exclusive to one broker, permanently. Nobody can prove that, including us.

No lead vendor can prove a lead was sold once. A delivery log proves a lead reached you, not that it reached nobody else. Any vendor who says they can prove it is showing you a receipt. We are not going to build a story around it. Each lead is sent to one client and never resold, and we do not sell aged data. Some of the largest brokerages in the country work with us on that basis, and have for years.

What a bad answer sounds like. A vendor who claims to prove exclusivity is showing you a delivery receipt. Ask instead whether they sell aged data, and whether each lead comes with a third-party certificate.

A 6-digit code, texted mid-application, that they must enter to submit.

No code, no submission, no lead. Every number delivered is a live mobile phone somebody was physically holding minutes before the record reached you. That single step is most of the reason a lead here costs $60 rather than $20 — a lot of traffic gets thrown away.

What a bad answer sounds like. "Phone-verified" and "validated" usually mean a database lookup that confirms the number format exists, not that a person answered it. Ask what physical action the merchant took to prove the number is theirs.

Meta and Instagram, one hundred percent, to our own funding application page.

Ads run to a landing page under a generic U.S. business funding brand. The merchant completes the application, clears the code, submits, and the record reaches your CRM in realtime. That is the whole funnel, and you can ask to see the page.

What a bad answer sounds like. A vendor who cannot name the channel is buying from someone else and reselling, which means they cannot tell you what the merchant was promised either. "Proprietary sources" is not an answer.

Nothing about rates. No "0% interest", no "borrow $50K, pay $900 a month".

The content is the targeting. Run a 0% interest ad and you get startups and self-employed operators working out of the house — they convert beautifully and fund at nothing. The messaging determines the business owner you attract, so we write to real operators and eat the higher cost per lead.

What a bad answer sounds like. If the ad promises a rate, a term or an approval, your rep has to walk that back on the first call. A lead that arrives expecting something you cannot deliver is worse than no lead.

Six minimums. A record missing any one is never sent and never billed.

$30K+ monthly revenue, requesting $15K+, 6+ months in business, four months of bank statements available, U.S.-based, and mobile-verified by code. These are gates, not scoring weights — nothing is "probably qualified".

What a bad answer sounds like. A vendor scoring leads rather than gating them is selling you the ones that failed, with a number attached. Ask whether a lead that misses a criterion is filtered out or just marked down.

A webhook POST in realtime, the moment the merchant submits.

You supply the inbound URL and the JSON your CRM expects; we shape our payload to your fields, so nothing on your side gets rebuilt. GoHighLevel, Salesforce, HubSpot, Close, or anything with an inbound webhook. A test lead goes through before anything real does.

What a bad answer sounds like. CSV delivery, a daily batch, or a portal you log into all mean the same thing: the lead is hours old before your rep sees it. On a merchant actively shopping that morning, hours is the whole game.

Yes. Daily cap, weekly cap, and a delivery window in your timezone.

The default is roughly five a day over ten business days. You can slow it to a hard weekly cap if your floor is small, or push to ten a day if it genuinely can absorb them. We do not dump an order on you over a weekend to clear a balance.

What a bad answer sounds like. A vendor who sits on your order for three weeks and then delivers thirty leads on a Saturday is managing their own liability at your expense. Ask what happens to the balance if you fall behind.

Spam, dead numbers and bounced emails are replaced free, on proof.

A number returning "not in service" gets replaced. A bounced email gets replaced. If we come up short on the order, the undelivered leads are refunded. A merchant not answering one call is not a spam lead, and we will say so.

What a bad answer sounds like. Either extreme is a warning. A vendor who replaces anything you complain about has no standard and is padding the order with junk; one who replaces nothing has no confidence in their own product. The policy should have a stated limit.

Clients report 2–4 funded deals per 50 leads as of September 2026. Best recorded is 8. Worst is zero.

Client-reported, not modelled. We quote the benchmark rather than the ceiling, because an expectation we cannot hit costs us more than the order was worth. Average funded deal is around $62k.

What a bad answer sounds like. A vendor who only quotes their best result is quoting an outlier. Ask for the range, and ask what the worst outcome looked like — a vendor who says it has never happened is either very new or not being straight with you.

Time to first dial. It is the variable that decides everything else.

A shop once came to us certain the batch was dead. Their CRM export showed an average time to first dial of fourteen hours, on merchants who applied at 9am. By the time anyone called, three other brokers had been through them. If your floor cannot hit a lead inside five minutes, we would rather say that before you pay than after.

What a bad answer sounds like. A vendor who never raises this is happy to sell you leads that will sit. The ones who care about repeat orders ask about your dial process before they take the money.

No. There is no free trial and no sample batch.

The first order is 50 leads at $60, which is $3,000, and the benchmark and the worst recorded outcome are both published so you know what you are risking before you pay. If risking $3,000 on a first order feels like a gamble, we are not the right partner for you, and we would rather say so now. We want to work with sales teams that dial inside five minutes and take this seriously, because a lead that sits for a day is wasted, and we would rather not sell it than watch that happen.

What a bad answer sounds like. Free trials sound generous and are usually the leads nobody else bought. A sample batch a vendor had time to prepare tells you about the sample, not the vendor.

At the bottom of the benchmark: $3,000 spend, two funded deals, roughly 4.1× at 10 points.

50 leads at $60 is $3,000. Two funded deals at $62k average is $124,000 funded; at 10 points that is $12,400, so $9,400 net. Run it at two rather than eight — if the math does not work at the low end, it does not work.

What a bad answer sounds like. Cost per lead is the wrong number to compare vendors on. A $20 lead that never answers costs infinitely more than a $60 lead that funds. Ask any vendor to walk you through the math at their *worst* typical outcome, not their best.

The merchant consents on our own funding page, and every lead comes with a third-party TrustedForm certificate of it. We do not scrub against DNC or litigator lists.

The disclosure sits at the point of submission and says that submitting a request authorizes contact about business-financing options. The certificate records the merchant completing the application, the disclosure exactly as they saw it, the submission timestamp, page URL, IP address and browser, so the consent record is yours to keep. We do not scrub against the DNC registry or litigator lists; the merchant applies on our page and the consent given there is what you receive.

What a bad answer sounds like. A vendor who says "TCPA compliant" but cannot show you the disclosure text as the merchant saw it, with a certificate to prove it, is asking you to carry the risk on their word. Ask for the wording and the certificate.