Call & lead buying checklist.
Prepare the handoff.
A campaign launch checklist for buyers who want clear operating rules and useful feedback from day one.
1. Define a useful inquiry.
Write the product, customer need, and markets your team actually serves. List the eligibility criteria that can be established before delivery and distinguish them from the decision your own team makes afterward. For home services, this may mean job type and service area. For insurance, it includes the product and states the agency serves.
Describe a rejected inquiry just as clearly as an accepted one. Duplicate records, wrong products, incorrect geography, disconnected calls, and incomplete records need a shared definition. Ask which checks occur before delivery and which outcomes require buyer review.
2. Match delivery to real capacity.
Document business hours and time zone, daily limits, concurrent call capacity, and after-hours handling. For leads, confirm the receiving system, required fields, acceptance response, and who receives integration alerts. Name a person who can pause or adjust the campaign when staffing changes.
A daily cap is only part of the picture. Ten calls arriving together create a different operational problem from ten spread over a day. Discuss how pacing and destination availability are handled. Check a sample record or test call before sending production traffic.
3. Agree the commercial definitions.
Confirm pricing, billing events, exclusivity or sharing terms, duplicate windows, dispute windows, and the evidence needed to review an exception. Do not assume that “qualified,” “exclusive,” or “real-time” has the same meaning across vendors. Put the relevant definition into the campaign agreement.
Ask what the consumer was told, where the inquiry originated, and what source or consent documentation can be provided for the proposed workflow. Documentation needs depend on the program; obtain appropriate review before launch.
4. Connect delivery with outcomes.
Agree identifiers that let the delivered inquiry connect to your CRM record and final disposition. Use a small set of consistent statuses, such as received, accepted, reached, qualified, quoted, and sold. Keep operational failures separate from consumer or product mismatches.
Choose a feedback owner and review cadence. An unworked lead is different from an unreachable consumer, and an unanswered call is different from a conversation that fails your qualification criteria. Keep those categories visible.
5. Start with a test you can evaluate.
Choose a scope your team can handle without changing several variables at once. Set the test budget and capacity, the period needed for outcomes to mature, and the conditions for expanding or pausing. Compare performance within a consistent market and format before drawing broad conclusions.