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

It's the angriest sentence in local-business marketing, and it's usually said while staring at an invoice: *we paid for those leads, and half of them never even got a call back.* The anger goes hunting for one villain — the vendor sold junk, or the front desk dropped the ball. The measured answer is almost always: both, in proportions you can compute.

The vendor's share

Some purchased leads are genuinely bad — recycled, out-of-area, or resold to four competitors simultaneously. That share is real, and it's the share everyone talks about, because blaming the vendor is free. A vendor selling shared leads is also selling a race: the lead goes to whoever responds first, and the vendor doesn't care who wins.

Your share

Here's the uncomfortable arithmetic. If your response system misses a share of all inquiries — and a 45-hour front desk covers 27% of the week's hours before lunches and procedures — then it misses that same share of the inquiries you paid for. Purchased leads don't arrive on a schedule that respects your staffing. They arrive at 8pm from someone browsing after work, which is exactly when nobody's there to enter the race the vendor sold you.

The number that settles the argument

Take last month's purchased leads and answer one question per lead: *how long until our first real response?* Not "did we eventually call" — time to first response. Sort into three buckets: fast, slow, never. The never-bucket is your share of the burn. The vendor's share is what remains after honest, fast responses still went nowhere. Practices that run this exercise usually discover the split isn't what the anger predicted.

In one live specialty practice we measure, about a third of contacts entered by front-desk staff never got a follow-up record created — the contact existed, the next step didn't. Nobody in that building was lazy. There was simply no system making the next step automatic, and paid leads died in the same gap free ones did.

What to do before buying another batch

Measure your coverage first. If 30% of inquiries slip, fixing that is worth more than any vendor negotiation — it upgrades every lead source you have, paid and free, simultaneously. Then, with a response system that answers at every hour, shared leads become winnable races instead of donations to better-wired competitors.