We paid for leads and half never got called — whose fault is that?

It's the angriest sentence in home-services marketing, usually said at an invoice: *we paid for those leads and half never got a call back.* The anger wants one villain. The measured answer is almost always both — in a split you can actually compute.

The vendor's share

Some bought leads are genuinely junk: recycled, out-of-area, or sold to four shops at once. Real, and worth negotiating over. But shared leads are also openly a race — the vendor sells the same homeowner to everyone and doesn't care who wins.

Your share

If your response system misses a share of all inquiries, it misses that same share of the ones you paid $40–80 each for. Bought leads arrive on the homeowner's schedule — evenings, lunch breaks, Sunday morning — which is exactly when trade shops are darkest. You paid to enter races that start when your office is closed.

The number that settles it

Pull last month's bought leads and answer one question per lead: minutes to our first real response. Three buckets — fast, slow, never. The never-bucket is your share of the burn; what died despite fast honest responses is the vendor's. Owners who run this exercise rarely find the split their anger predicted.

Order of operations

Measure and fix coverage first — it upgrades every lead source you have, free and paid, at once. Then bought leads become winnable races instead of donations to whichever competitor wired their response layer first.

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