Including us. Every one has a specific, checkable answer — and a vendor who cannot give you one is telling you something.
Tap a question to open it. Each answer also says what a bad answer sounds like, so you can use these on anyone you are considering.
Sold to exactly one broker, permanently. Not this week — ever.
A lead comes in, the system picks one client, it goes to that client. Not a list of five. It is never resold later that week, and never resold as aged data twelve months on. We do not have that revenue line and do not want it.
"Exclusive for 30 days" or "exclusive at time of sale" means resold afterwards. Ask specifically whether they sell aged data — the ones running 40-cents-a-lead aged data ads are reselling somebody's exclusive lead for the fourth time.
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.
"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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
2–4 funded deals per 50 leads. 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.
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.
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.
Not free — but you can dial unassigned leads live, on a call, before you buy.
We will pull three to five leads that came in that morning and have not been routed yet, drop the numbers in the chat, and you dial them while we are on the line. No script, no prep. Ask them whatever you want, including whether anyone else has called.
Free trials sound generous and are usually the leads nobody else bought. A vendor confident in the feed will let you test it live rather than hand you a sample batch they had time to prepare.
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.
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.
Bring the list to the call and work down it. If an answer does not hold up, that is worth knowing in fifteen minutes rather than after an order.
We will tell you straight up if we cannot help you. No commission deals, no free trials, no chasing you for three weeks.