Cold calling vendor worked the list for eleven weeks, handed back 38 leads at $65 each, zero made it to appointment

The $2,470 spent on those leads looked defensible when the agreement was signed because the vendor quoted a 3.8 percent contact rate on a 1,200-record list of absentee owners, which is a plausible number for that list type. The problem was not the contact rate. It was what "lead" meant in the agreement, which was any owner who said they might consider selling in the next twelve months. That definition is almost impossible to fail against, so the vendor hit their delivery number and invoiced on time. Of the 38 leads, six had phone numbers that went straight to voicemail on every follow-up attempt, nine said on the second call that they were not actually thinking about selling, and the remaining 23 either could not agree to a price range within 30 percent of market or stopped responding after the first exchange. No appointments. No contracts. The vendor pointed to the agreement, which did not define appointment-ready and said nothing about conversion. They were right. The agreement was the loss, not the calling. A deal worth studying here: if the same $2,470 had been spent at a rate of $55 per caller hour on a transparent dial log, the shop would have needed to produce roughly 45 hours of documented work before the invoice was questionable, and the output would have been auditable record by record. The per-lead model hides the funnel. The hourly model exposes it. What the agreement should have included was a definition of qualified that tied to a scheduled callback with a decision-maker, a price range disclosed, and a timeline under 90 days, with a cure period if delivery fell short of that standard. Before you sign another per-lead agreement, what does their current contract actually say the word "lead" means?