Both of my calling vendors billed me for the same seller

Question

I run two vendors against the same two counties, pre-foreclosure plus high-equity absentee. Vendor A bills $1.10 per contracted contact, vendor B $0.95. I finally pulled both suppression files and compared them against my master pull. 5,800 of 9,200 records are in both. One owner got dialed by both inside four days and told vendor B's caller she'd already said no to someone, and then both vendors submitted her as a lead the same week and both invoiced.

I can eat the duplicate billing once. What I can't figure out is what language actually prevents it going forward. Exclusivity per list doesn't work because I'm the one supplying the list. Dedupe on phone number doesn't work either, skip trace gives me four numbers for one owner and the two vendors are working different ones. Anyone solved this at the contract level rather than by just firing one of them?

Rena Expert · Accepted Answer

Dedupe on the parcel identifier, not the phone. One owner can carry four skip-traced numbers, two mailing addresses and a spelling variant, and any of those will slip past a phone-level match. If your master pull carries APN, make APN the unit of assignment and make both vendors echo it back on every submitted record. A record they can't tie to an APN doesn't get paid.

Then the contract needs three things working together. Assignment is per record and exclusive for a stated window, ninety days is common, and the window is measured from first dial rather than from submission. Suppression exchange is daily and automated, not a monthly spreadsheet, because four days of overlap is exactly what a weekly file produces. Attribution is settled by earliest timestamped call recording, and you require the recording to be furnished on request, not just the disposition code.

What actually costs you more than the duplicate invoice is the complaint exposure. If a homeowner tells vendor B's caller she already declined, and B keeps that record live, the stop request now exists in one vendor's system and not the other. Whether that creates a problem for you depends on how the do-not-call and consent rules apply to your arrangement and your state, and that's a question for a lawyer who does telemarketing work, but the practical fix is the same either way: stop requests flow into a single master suppression list you own, not into each vendor's CRM.

Also check whose caller ID they're using. If both are branded to your company on different numbers, complaint volume and carrier flagging attach to your brand while the vendors keep dialing. Splitting the list geographically is cleaner than either of these fixes if you can live with losing a like-for-like comparison.

tylerbrooks9 · Answer

Cleanest version I've seen of this is just splitting the pull by even and odd APN and giving each shop half. You lose the head-to-head on the same records, but you can still compare cost per contract signed at the end of the quarter, which is the only number that mattered anyway.

megan_doyle15 · Answer

What's a suppression file in this context? I assumed it was just the DNC scrub, but from thicket's post it sounds like it's the list of everyone already touched.

brandonlee36 · Answer

@rigging both, sort of. Mine has DNC hits, wrong numbers, people who said stop, and everyone already contacted. The problem is each vendor keeps their own version and mine is stitched together from their exports.

@rena-expert the APN echo-back is the part I was missing. Vendor B's submissions come back with owner name and phone only, so I've been matching on name strings, which is why the duplicate got through.

Both of my calling vendors billed me for the same seller

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