We paid for leads and half never got called.

The vendor's share — real, and the easy half to blame

Some purchased leads are genuinely junk: recycled from old campaigns, outside your service area, or fabricated by incentive-chasing form-fillers. And shared-lead vendors openly sell the same customer to several businesses — the product is a race, not a customer. That share of the waste is the vendor's, it's worth negotiating over, and blaming it is free, which is why it absorbs all the anger.

Your share, part 1: the alert that aged

The vendor's notification landed — in an email checked hourly, an app nobody has open, a dashboard someone reviews at day's end. By the time a human saw the lead, the race was minutes or hours old. In a live business we measure, waiting inquiries booked at a third of the rate of fast-answered ones; on shared leads that curve is steeper, because a competitor's auto-text answered while your notification sat.

Your share, part 2: the dark hours you paid to be found in

Lead vendors run around the clock — homeowners file requests at 9pm, insurance shoppers browse Sunday morning. Your ad spend buys those leads; your response hours determine whether anything happens next. Buying leads at hours you can't answer is paying an entry fee for races that start while your building is dark.

Your share, part 3: one attempt, then the pile

The lead got called — once, from an unknown number, at a moment they couldn't answer. No text identifying who's calling and why, no second attempt, no sequence. In our measured data, a third of even staff-handled inquiries silently lost their next step. "We called them" and "we reached them" are different claims, and only one of them wins races.

Why the split matters more than the anger

If the waste is mostly the vendor's, negotiate or switch — with timestamped evidence instead of a feeling. If it's mostly yours, firing the vendor changes nothing and doubling the budget doubles the burn. Every dollar of response-side fix also upgrades every OTHER lead source you have — the free ones included. The assessment estimates your split; the discovery measures it.