Every agency owner who's bought even one lead has felt burned. But here's what our Chief Growth Officer Evan Smith learned after two decades of buying, selling, and working leads across multiple industries: it's rarely the leads. The agencies that make lead buying work all share three habits that Evan shared with Heath Shearon on the Insurance Town Podcast. They have a long-term view, they're fanatical about numbers, and they're dedicated to process. Miss any one of these, and you'll feel burned every time.
Evan's been on every side of the lead equation. Run call centers. Sold leads. Bought leads. Built systems for companies across financial services, real estate, and insurance. And one thing never changes: everyone who buys leads either gets burned or feels like they've been burned.
But here's the reality. The folks who feel burned often didn't have the right tools, temperament, or training. They were sold something easy when lead buying is anything but simple. It's like IKEA sending you home with particle board and screws but no instruction manual. You can't just hand someone leads and say "figure it out."
Lead buying isn't a get-rich-quick scheme. Sometimes it works fast if you already have great process and the right agents in place. But most of the time? It requires three specific habits that separate agencies building on leads from agencies getting burned by them.
Give it 30 to 60 days minimum. One bad batch doesn't sink the operation.
Too many agencies try aged leads, get minimal results in a week, and want to turn everything off. But aged leads aren't the real test. Real-time leads with proper follow-up over 30 to 60 days? That's when you actually know if it works.
The biggest agencies in the country (captive or independent) are buying way more leads than you think. They're not lucky. They know one bad vendor doesn't kill the whole strategy. They take good runs at it. They make it about math, not about whether it worked today.
It probably won't work today. But 30 days from now? That's a different story.
To learn the new rules of lead buying, check out this blog.
Working leads is a math problem. Period.
There are publicly traded lead companies built on the backs of customers who buy, work, and close leads successfully. These aren't scams. They're proven business models. If you can't make it work with the big, reputable companies, it's probably a process thing.
Successful lead buyers know their target cost per acquisition cold. They know exactly what they want to pay for a new piece of business, and they work backward from there. They track everything. Not just conversions, but dials, contacts, transfers, and every step in between.
They're not guessing. They're calculating. And they're comfortable with the fact that working leads requires a certain expertise: someone who's grown up in this, made the mistakes, and knows the numbers inside out.
We ran the numbers. Learn how you can turn your agency into a margin expansion machine in this video.
This is where most agencies fall apart.
Lead vendors sell a product. They have clients who love it and are building entire businesses off that product. Then there's someone else screaming the vendor is a fraud. And somewhere in between is the person saying "these leads suck, but I need more."
Which is it? Are they terrible or do you need more?
The answer reveals whether you have process or not. The agencies that succeed have consistent follow-up, proven cadence, and no cherry-picking. They work the system the same way every time. They've either built that process internally or found a way to plug it in from the outside.
Because here's the truth: there's no such thing as a bad lead. There's just an expensive one. A lead that's garbage for one agency can be gold for another. The difference? Process. Learn how to supercharge your process and transform into a $10 million agency in this video.
The advantage of lead buying is simple: your chief marketing officer is now just your credit card. As many leads as you can fit on your Amex, as many people as you can get to work them. Scale becomes nearly infinite if you've got the right process involved.
But you have to make this about math, not feelings. You have to take the long view. And you need a systematic process that doesn't rely on whether your best agent showed up to work today or got distracted by an inbound call.
For years, if you wanted to work leads at scale, you had three options: build a domestic call center, hire an offshore team, or don't scale. All three came with massive headaches—staffing, training, turnover, management overhead.
Now there's a fourth option. AI that acts as your call center, handling the process and the math problem for you. That's what Mav does. It’s the instruction manual most agencies never got. The systematic process that works every lead the same way, tracks every interaction, and qualifies prospects before they ever reach your agents.
It’s how agencies get these three habits working in their favor. Instant response via text. Consistent qualification. Perfect follow-up cadence. The kind of process that used to require hiring someone who'd spent 20 years making every mistake in the book. An agency went from 3,000 leads on a pilot to 70,000 leads per month within a year. At 1% conversion, that's 700 policies per month. There's no mystery here. Just long-term thinking, dedication to numbers, and systematic process.
These three habits separate agencies that scale from agencies that stay stuck. Long-term view. Numbers obsession. Process dedication.
Get those three right, and leads work. Miss even one, and you'll feel burned—even when the leads are fine.
The good news? You don't have to spend two decades learning this the hard way. Other agencies are already running this model. You can too. The question is whether you're ready to commit to all three habits, not just one or two. See Evan's full conversation with Heath on Insurance Town!
