Should you buy leads?

Sometimes, and the answer is arithmetic rather than opinion. Buying leads is a reasonable bridge if you answer within minutes and your margin on an average job can carry a cost per order several times the advertised lead price. It also needs a date on which you stop. It is money burnt when the enquiry gets called back the next morning. GullySales does not sell leads and takes no cut from anyone who does, so what follows is the arithmetic we would run with you before you renew.

Shared leads, exclusive leads, and lists sold as either

A shared lead is sold to three, four or five businesses in the same moment. Every phone rings at once, the buyer takes the first call and gives the rest a polite no. Speed decides it. Not price, not skill.

An exclusive lead is sold to you alone, at two to five times the shared price. You are still not the only quote that buyer will collect. You are the only one the platform sold.

Then there are the lists. "Exclusive home based business leads" and their cousins are data sets of people who ticked a box on some site once, sold and resold for years. Nobody on that list asked about you. Price it as a cold calling list, which is close to nothing.

In India this model runs through JustDial, Sulekha, IndiaMART lead credits and the property portals. Elsewhere it reaches painting contractors and locksmiths through home services marketplaces on the same terms. The names change and the arithmetic does not.

What a bought lead actually costs

The advertised price is not the price. You have to count the numbers that never answer, the people who wanted something you do not sell, and the ones who had booked somebody else before your call connected.

Here is the same ₹15,000 spent two ways. Every figure is illustrative.

Same spend, same three orders. The headline price per lead told you nothing useful in either column. Then add the part no invoice shows: a hundred calls at four minutes each is most of somebody's working day, and that person is paid.

So the only number worth tracking is cost per order, set against your gross margin on an average job. If a job leaves you ₹21,000 and the leads cost ₹5,000 an order, the platform is earning its keep. If the same job leaves you ₹6,000, you are working for the platform.

The contract terms that hurt

• Auto-renewal with a notice window buried in the terms, so the month you meant to leave is the month you are billed for.
• A minimum monthly spend that will not pause in your slow season. Everyone paints before Diwali and nobody paints through the monsoon, and the invoice does not know the difference.
• Credits instead of refunds, with a dispute window of 24 or 48 hours. "The number was switched off for three days" is rarely on the list of accepted reasons.
• Your radius and your categories set by the platform, so you pay for jobs two hours away and for work you stopped taking last year.
• A card on file that tops the balance up on its own. Ask what happens to an unused balance the day you leave.
• Priority placement sold on top of the lead price. That is the same lead, at a higher price, with a better chance of ringing first.
• The contact record living in the platform rather than in your CRM. When that customer needs you again in three years, you are renting them back.

Get every one of those answered in writing before the first payment, including the exit. A salesperson who will not put the notice period in an email is telling you something.

When buying leads is a reasonable bridge

There are four situations where it makes sense. You have opened in an area where nobody searches your name yet. You have launched a service line with no page, no reviews and no history behind it. Your own search visibility is four to six months away, which is honest and slow, and a crew sitting idle cannot wait that long. Or you have capacity that expires: an empty Thursday slot is worth something today and nothing on Friday.

Three rules keep it a bridge rather than a habit. One named person owns the account and calls every lead inside five minutes. Cap bought leads at a share of your total enquiries, a quarter being a sensible ceiling, so the business never sits on somebody else's switch. And on the day you start, write the stop date in the calendar along with what you will have built by then.

When you should not buy them at all

Your reply time is the first test. If a new enquiry waits two hours for a call, buying shared leads funds your competitors' quarter, and you should fix lead response and follow-up before you spend another rupee. For locksmiths this is brutal. A lead answered on the second ring is a job. The same lead answered twenty minutes later is a person already inside their house.

Skip it too when the job is one-off and low value, because there is no repeat order to carry the acquisition cost. And skip it when the buyer decides slowly on trust, which is why bought leads do so badly for day care centres. A parent visits three centres, asks two other parents, and takes a fortnight. A stranger's phone number does not shorten any of that.

A painting contractor's month, worked through

For example, a painting contractor in Bengaluru with two crews spends ₹18,000 on shared leads in August. The figures here are illustrative. He gets 110 leads, reaches 61 people, finds 28 with a real requirement, sends 20 quotations and wins four jobs at an average of ₹70,000. At a 30 percent gross margin that is ₹84,000 earned against ₹18,000 of leads and about two full days of calling.

That works. In July, with the same spend, it did not: everybody collects quotes in the monsoon and nobody lets painters into the house, so the four orders became one.

What he changed after a year was not the platform. He called 40 past customers before the festival season and put photographs of finished flats on his Google Business Profile. He also started asking for a neighbour's name on the day each job finished. Those enquiries carry no per-lead fee. The bought leads stayed, at half the budget, filling the gaps.

What to do next

Pull last month's platform invoice and put it next to your own order book. Work out the real cost per order, not the cost per lead, and hold it against the margin on an average job. If that sum has never been done, it is an hour's work and it will settle the argument about renewing.

Then decide what the bridge is for, and give it a date. Our free audit looks at where your enquiries come from, how fast they are answered and whether they were ever buyers, which is exactly the question a lead invoice deserves.