How to test a lead list vendor in one week

Day one: write the scoring sheet before you see any data

Define your must-have fields, your exclusion rules and your pass mark in writing before requesting a sample, so you cannot rationalise a bad list later.

Write three lists. Must match: industry, employee range, geography, seniority and job function. Must exclude: competitors, vendors to you, wrong departments, franchises or agencies if they distort your segment. Must include: a mobile or direct dial, a work email, company name and a reason the record matched.

Then set the pass mark. A reasonable bar is 85 percent of records satisfying every must-match rule and 70 percent carrying a mobile number or confirmed direct dial. Writing this down first is the whole trick, because it converts a subjective argument into a score. The ICP builder produces a brief in this shape.

Day two: request the sample the right way

Ask for records against your real profile, not a generic industry. Refuse a curated hand pick by asking for the next records the system would deliver, not the best ones it can find. Ask for the same fields you would receive in production, including the match reason.

Vendors that cannot produce a live sample quickly are telling you something about their fulfilment. At LeadNumbers, five sample prospects are free and come from the same pipeline that fills a paid account, which is the only comparison worth making.

• Real profile, not a generic vertical.
• Next records in the queue, not a hand picked showcase.
• Production field set, including match reasoning.
• Delivered in the format you would actually receive.

Day three and four: dial it, do not just read it

Reading a spreadsheet tells you nothing about whether phones ring. Give the sample to a rep with a simple brief: dial every number twice at different times of day, and tag each outcome as connected, voicemail, gatekeeper, wrong person or dead.

Dead numbers above 10 percent, or wrong-person results above 5 percent, mean the vendor is selling stale records regardless of how impressive the database size is. Freshness at the moment of delivery is the only freshness that counts.

Day five: score match quality against your sheet

Go record by record and mark each must-match rule as pass or fail. Do not average feelings. The two failure patterns worth naming are silent widening, where the vendor loosened your criteria to hit volume, and adjacency drift, where records are in a neighbouring industry that shares keywords with yours.

Both look like a full list and produce an empty pipeline. A vendor that returns fewer records and tells you it ran out of matches is far more valuable than one that quietly fills the gap with near misses.

Day six and seven: negotiate the terms that matter

Three terms decide whether the relationship survives contact with reality. First, a replacement policy with a stated window, so wrong records cost you nothing. Second, no duplicate delivery, ever, including across months. Third, the right to change volume monthly, because commitments made before you know your connect rate are guesses.

Anything longer than a month of commitment should come with a discount you would take anyway. Our comparison pages cover how this plays out against specific providers on the compare page.

• Free replacement for wrong numbers and emails, inside a stated window.
• Written no duplicate guarantee across the whole account history.
• Monthly volume changes without penalty.
• Suppression honoured within one business day.