You Spent $500 on Leads This Week. Here Is the Report You Should Be Able to Pull on Friday
Seven numbers, per lead source, that tell you whether the leads or the follow-up is the problem, and when to stop buying.
Ask agents where to buy leads and you will get forty answers and no numbers. These are questions from agents like you: one says he spends over $500 a week and calls the results "solid", a second tried eight leads from a vendor and closed one, and a third has "never paid for a single lead." All three were probably telling the truth. None of them could have shown you a report. The most useful answer came from an agency owner shopping for a lead partner. His list of requirements is the best description of lead accountability we have seen, so we are borrowing it: source, call recordings, form submissions, cost per lead, lead quality notes, and a simple weekly report . That is the Friday report. This post is about how to build it, whatever vendor you use. Why most agents cannot answer "did the leads pay for themselves?" Cost per lead is on the invoice. Return on the lead is spread across four places that do not talk to each other: The vendor's portal knows what you bought and when it was delivered. Your phone knows whether you reached anyone. Your CRM knows what you typed in the status field, if you typed anything. The carrier statement, months later, knows whether the policy paid, lapsed or charged back. Any report that stops at "closed" in the CRM is a guess. A final-expense policy that is written on Tuesday, drafted on Friday and cancelled in month two shows up as a win in the CRM and a chargeback on the statement. Agents describe exactly this: big submitted numbers, much smaller issued-and-paid numbers, and a difference nobody tracked. The seven numbers on the Friday report For each lead source, for the week and for the trailing 90 days: Leads delivered. Not leads purchased. Vendors credit back bad numbers; count what actually arrived. Cost per lead delivered. Invoice divided by line 1. Contact rate. Leads you spoke to, divided by leads delivered. This one number separates "the leads are bad" from "I called them once at 2 PM." Time to first attempt. Median minutes from delivery to your first call or text. If this is measured in hours, fix it before you change vendors. Applications submitted and policies placed , as two separate numbers. First-year commission received , from the statement, not from the illustration. Cost per placed policy and, when the money lands, cost per paid policy . This is your real cost per acquisition. We wrote about why almost nobody has it in Do You Know Your Cost Per Acquisition? What the report tells you that nobody else can Whether the vendor or the follow-up is the problem. Low contact rate with a fast first attempt is a vendor problem. Low contact rate with a slow first attempt is yours. Agents will argue about a vendor for an hour without anyone stating their time to first attempt. Which source produces business that stays. Aged leads worked by door-knocking, live transfers, TV inbounds and Facebook forms all have different persistency. A source with a cheap cost per placed policy and a terrible cost per paid policy is a chargeback machine. When to stop. "I'm desperate, can't afford my mortgage" is something an agent actually said. The report gives you a stop rule before you get there: if cost per paid policy is above your first-year commission for two consecutive months, that source is costing you money on every sale. How to build it this week Put a lead source field on every contact and make it required at import. If a vendor delivers by webhook, the source is set for you. If they deliver by spreadsheet, set it on the import. Log every attempt from the same system that holds the contact. Calls placed from a personal cell phone do not exist as far as the report is concerned. Record the policy's placed date and, when the statement arrives, its first commission and any chargeback, on the policy record. That is the only way line 7 is a fact. Run the report on the same day every week. Friday, before you order next week's leads. Where AgencyView fits AgencyView keeps the lead, the calls, the policy and the carrier commission statement in one record, which is what makes the Friday report a query instead of a reconstruction. Leads arrive through the built-in lead marketplace or through a vendor webhook that identifies the vendor. Calls are placed and recorded from the contact, so every attempt is on the record when you build the report. Policies are written against the contact, and the CFO Center reads the commission statements synced nightly from your commission tracking account and flags clawbacks and policies that never paid. What you placed and what actually paid sit in the same place; bring the vendor invoice for what you spent. Related: The CFO Center: What Your Commission Statements Are Not Telling You .
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