$19k on a VA cold calling program, two contracts, both fell out

Ran an outbound VA program for eleven months and shut it down in the fall. Writing it up because the failure was structural and I didn't see it until month seven.

Setup. Three VAs through an agency, $1,250 each per month, plus dialer and data at around $340/mo combined. Call it $4,090/mo, $19,200 over the run once I add the onboarding fee and a month of overlap during a replacement. Target was absentee owners in two suburban counties, single family, 1960s to 1980s stock.

Production. They made about 118,000 dials over the run. Contact rate 4.1%, so roughly 4,800 conversations. 312 leads marked warm in the CRM. 41 of those got to a real seller conversation with me. 6 offers made, 2 accepted, both dead before closing. One was a title problem the seller didn't disclose and probably didn't know about. The other one just changed her mind after her son got involved.

So $19,200 for zero closings. That's the headline and it isn't the interesting part.

The interesting part is where the funnel actually broke. It wasn't the dials, the contact rate was normal for the data quality I bought. It broke between "warm lead" and "real seller conversation." 312 to 41 is 13%, and when I went back and listened to recordings from month four, most of the 271 that didn't convert were people who said something like "maybe someday" and got tagged warm because the VA's comp had a bonus on warm leads. I built that bonus. I made warm leads the unit of production and I got warm leads.

Second structural thing. I never gave them a disqualification script. They had a qualification script, so every conversation was oriented toward finding a reason to keep going. A good outbound program spends most of its energy ending calls fast. Mine spent it extending them.

Third, and this is the one I'd argue about with myself. The agency's team lead flagged the tagging inflation in month three. She put it in the monthly report. I read the report and looked at the top line lead count and felt fine about it. The management layer I paid the markup for did its job and I ignored the output.

What I'd do differently. Comp on appointments held with me, not on lead tags, and accept that the volume number gets ugly. Write the disqualification criteria before the pitch script. And pick a smaller geography, because two counties meant nobody built up any local knowledge and every call started from zero.

I'd also run it four months and kill it, not eleven. Months eight through eleven were me hoping the sunk cost would resolve itself.