How to vet a lead generation company: 12 questions to ask before you buy leads or calls

Most lead buyers choose a vendor the way they would choose a printer: compare a price, read a few testimonials, and sign. Then the first month arrives, the contact rate is poor, half the calls are short, and nobody can explain where the prospects came from. Almost every one of those problems could have been predicted by asking the right questions before the first dollar was spent.

This checklist is written for owners and sales managers buying leads, inbound calls, or live transfers for insurance, home services, debt relief, or legal intake. It is twelve questions, grouped by what they protect you from, with notes on what a good answer and a worrying answer sound like.

Sourcing: where do the prospects come from?

1. How are prospects generated for my vertical?

You are asking about the channel: search ads, social ads, content sites, comparison forms, inbound phone listings, outbound calling, or a mix. A good answer names the channels for your product specifically and explains why they fit it. A worrying answer is a vague “proprietary network” with nothing behind it.

2. Are any of the leads bought from other vendors and resold?

Many vendors buy from each other. That is not automatically bad, but it lengthens the chain between the prospect’s consent and your phone call, and every link is a place where the record can break. You want to know whether you are buying first-party leads or someone else’s inventory.

3. Are the leads fresh, or can they be aged?

A lead submitted minutes ago and a lead submitted three weeks ago are different products. Aged leads have a place at a lower price, but they should never be delivered as if they were real time. Ask how quickly leads are delivered after submission and whether the timestamp is passed with each one.

Consent and compliance: can you prove you were allowed to call?

4. What consent language does the prospect see, and does it name my business?

Ask for a screenshot of the actual form or the script for calls. The consent should be clear enough that a reasonable person understands they will be contacted, by whom, and how. Our guide to consent for lead buyers covers what to look for in more detail.

5. What record of consent do I receive with each lead?

A good vendor can give you, per lead, the time of submission, the page or script, the consent text, and often a third-party certificate that records the session. If the answer is “we keep that on our side,” ask how quickly you can get it when a complaint arrives. The answer should be hours, not weeks.

6. How are do-not-call lists and opt-outs handled?

The vendor should scrub against the national registry where required and pass opt-outs both ways. You also need a plan for your own side: when a prospect asks you to stop, that request has to be honored promptly.

Screening: what makes a lead or call qualified?

7. Which screening questions are asked, and can I change them?

The criteria should be yours. A good vendor proposes questions that usually work for your product, such as age and state for final expense or debt amount and type for debt settlement, and then lets you add, remove, or reword them. A vendor that sells one fixed product to everyone in your vertical is optimizing for its own volume, not your close rate.

8. For calls, how is a billable call defined?

For pay-per-call, the usual definition is a call that passes a duration threshold and matches the criteria. Ask what the threshold is, whether hold time counts, what happens when your line is busy, and whether you can hear the recording when you dispute a call.

Money: what exactly are you paying for?

9. What can I return or reject, and within what window?

Every vendor has a return policy. What matters is whether it is written into your agreement, whether the reasons are specific, such as wrong number, outside my states, or already represented, and how long you have to flag a problem. A return window you cannot realistically meet is not a return policy.

10. Is delivery exclusive, and if not, how many buyers share each lead?

This changes how fast you need to call and how much each lead is worth to you. We wrote a separate guide on exclusive versus shared leads. The short version: get the rule and the maximum number of buyers in writing.

Working together: what happens after launch?

11. Will you run a small, scoped test first?

A test should be large enough to learn from and small enough not to hurt. It should have a start date, an end date, and a review meeting on the calendar. A vendor that insists on a large commitment before you have seen a single lead is pricing in the risk that you will not stay.

12. Who reviews results with me, and how often?

You want a named person, a reporting cadence, and a way to change criteria based on what you learn. Ask what the vendor will need from you, too: conversion feedback, disposition codes, or a weekly call. The best campaigns are the ones where both sides look at the same numbers.

Red flags that should end the conversation

• Guaranteed conversion rates or sales, before the vendor knows anything about your team.
• No sample of the consent language or the screening script.
• Pricing that is fixed before anyone has asked about your states, hours, or criteria.
• Pressure to prepay a large balance with no test period.
• Vague answers about where prospects come from.

The question vendors should be asking you

A good vendor interviews you back. Which states are you licensed in? What hours can you answer? How fast do you call back web leads? What does a closed deal look like, and what is it worth? If a vendor never asks, it cannot build a campaign for your team, only sell you its inventory.

That is the conversation we start every campaign with. If you want to see how your answers translate into a campaign specification, send us a short note about what you sell and where, or apply as a partner and your account manager will come prepared.