The lead market works on an asymmetry: the seller knows how old the data is and the buyer does not. Everything below is about closing that gap before you pay.
Test before you buy at scale
Never buy a large batch first. Buy the smallest lot the supplier will sell and call every one of them within 24 hours.
You are checking four things:
Are they real? Wrong numbers, dead numbers, people who have never heard of the category.
Are they fresh? "I enquired about that six months ago" means the data has been sitting, and probably been sold before.
Are they exclusive? "Three people have already called me about this" means you bought the same list as your competitors. Exclusivity should be in writing.
Did they actually enquire? This is the one that matters most, and the one suppliers are vaguest about. Someone who filled a form asking about home loans is a lead. Someone whose number was scraped is not — they are a complaint waiting to happen.
Price against your own numbers
Ignore what the supplier says a lead is worth. Work it out:
- What is a closed customer worth to you in gross profit?
- What share of leads in this category do you actually close?
- Multiply. That is what a lead is worth to you.
Pay meaningfully less than that. If the seller's price is close to your ceiling, there is no business in it even if every lead is genuine.
Market rates move with category, season and geography — insurance in December is not insurance in June. Any supplier quoting one flat rate across everything is not pricing on data.
The consent question
This decides whether you should be in the transaction at all.
Ask the supplier plainly: where did the consent come from, and can you show it? A serious supplier can describe the source — a campaign, a comparison site, a form — and produce evidence. One who cannot is selling scraped data, and the exposure transfers to you the moment you dial.
India's data protection regime and telecom rules on unsolicited commercial communication both bite here. The reputational cost of being the company that cold-calls people who never asked is separate and larger.
Selling leads
The same rules run in reverse. Sell fresh, sell exclusive, be able to evidence consent, and price against what the buyer can realistically earn. A supplier who does those four things keeps buyers for years; one who does not gets one sale per customer.
How we work
We buy and sell leads at the prevailing market rate for the category and geography, quoted per batch before purchase — not off a flat rate card, because a flat rate card is a sign the seller is not looking at the data.
Everything we supply comes with consent for contact. We do not deal in scraped data, which occasionally costs us a sale and has never once cost us a client.
If you would rather generate than buy, that is usually the better long-term answer, and it is what our leads and marketing desk is built around.
General information, not legal advice. Confirm your obligations under applicable data protection and telecom regulations before running any outreach.