Are Your Agency’s Leads Warm, or Just Loaded Into Your CRM?
When you hire an agency, you’re paying for warm leads. That means people who saw your creative, clicked, read your page, and filled out a form. Your team’s job is the last step: a friendly, fast follow-up.
Here is the risk. Contact lists are cheap and sold openly. Some vendors sell 50 or 50,000 contacts with no contract. Others advertise 250 contacts for about $99. Nothing technical stops a list from being imported into a CRM and put on a drip sequence, which makes the pipeline look full.
I’m not claiming this is common among agencies, and I have no published case to point to. I’m saying it’s possible, because I’ve seen the same tactic in another setting. At an institution where I used to work, we used purchased student contact lists for cold outreach. If an organization can buy contacts and call them, a vendor can buy the same contacts and call them “leads.”
Why it matters. Cold contacts convert far worse than people who opted in, and your staff has to do the persuading. You’d be paying an agency to build warm demand and getting cold names to chase.
Regulators take this seriously.
The FTC settled with Response Tree, which ran more than 50 sites that harvested consumer information and sold it as leads, with a $7 million judgment.
Another company called millions of numbers bought from lead generators that falsely claimed consent. The FTC said buyers must do due diligence.
Career Education Corporation paid $30 million over deceptive lead generators.
Run this audit:
Call 20-30 recent leads. Ask how they found you. Track how many don’t remember filling out a form.
Verify sources. Tags can be added by anyone with CRM access, so match each lead to an ad click, campaign, and timestamp in the ad platform.
Scan for junk. Look for duplicate or invalid emails, disposable domains, mismatched area codes, and bursts of submissions seconds apart.
Ask for raw platform reports, not just the agency’s summary.
Check your own speed. The best-known study (Harvard Business Review, 2011) found that responding within an hour made qualifying a lead far more likely. Slow follow-up can mimic a lead-quality problem.
A few (1-2%) “who are you?” responses are normal. A pattern of them is a reason to ask your agency for an explanation. If it can’t trace your leads back to your campaigns, that is a red flag.
Bottom line: an agency’s job isn’t to fill your CRM. It’s to send you people who asked to hear from you.
We wrote this in response to the many conversations we’re having with lead-driven businesses. The same concerns keep coming up: “We need higher-quality leads.” “We need more leads who already know our product.” “I’m paying a lot and still not converting enough from my pipeline.” In many cases, this isn’t an ad spend problem. It’s a system and narrative problem. Our agency focuses on quality over quantity, so you don’t waste valuable time trying to convert cold leads.
Sources:
Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads,” Harvard Business Review, March 2011. I couldn’t retrieve the original, so link it directly before publishing.
