Everybody argues about whether buying leads is worth it. Almost nobody talks about how you stop.
Two comments, from two different contractors, on two different videos. These are their words and their numbers, not mine, and I have no way to verify either one:
"When i tried to cancel they told me that i owe them over $1000 for canceling. Lets just say that i went to my bank and took back about $1400 and now im in collections."
And:
"i had to cancel the service today and they are taking me to collections over $778 i owe them. i paid them over 2k in leads and most of them were bad leads and with people not answering their phones."
I'm not going to tell you who was right in either of those situations. I don't know, I wasn't there, and I'm not the guy to be handing out opinions on somebody's account dispute.
What I'll say is that both of those men found out how the exit worked on the day they tried to use it. That part is avoidable, and it's the only part of this you control.
First, what you're actually buying
A shared lead is not a customer. It's a notification that a customer exists, sold to several contractors at once.
One commenter put the number he'd been told: "when you buy these leads the lead company that is giving you these leads is dealing with about 50 plus other contractors." Whether that's the real figure for any given service, the model is the model. You're one of several phones ringing on the same homeowner.
Which changes what you're paying for. You're not paying for a job. You're paying for a footrace, and the person who wins it is whoever calls first, which is usually whoever happened to be standing next to their phone.
That's also why so many of the complaints sound like the second guy's. Bad leads. Nobody answering. When a homeowner fills one form and gets six calls in ten minutes, they stop picking up around call three. Everybody after that paid for a voicemail.
Somebody laid out the structural version and it got a lot of agreement: the lead companies sit between you and the customer, and you pay for the privilege of being introduced to somebody in your own town.
None of that makes it useless. Plenty of contractors have built real businesses off bought leads, especially starting out, and "it's a footrace" is a solvable problem if you're set up to answer fast. It's just a very different product than the one most people think they're buying.
The three things to find before you sign
Whatever you're signing up for, lead service or marketing retainer or anything else, get these three in writing. Email counts. A screenshot of the terms counts.
- How do I cancel? Specifically: who do I tell, how do I tell them, and how much notice do you need? "Call your account rep" is not a process, it's a person who might be on vacation. You want a method that produces a record.
- What do I owe if I cancel? Ask it plainly and get the number, or get "nothing" in writing. This is the question both of those guys found the answer to at the worst possible time.
- Is the lead mine alone? Exclusive or shared. If it's shared, how many others. There's no wrong answer, a shared lead at the right price is a fine deal, but you need to know which product you bought so you can price your time against it.
Ask all three before money changes hands, when you're the one being sold to and everybody's being helpful. The answers are much harder to get on the day you want out.
And if any of the three gets a vague answer, that's information. Not proof of anything bad. Just a thing to weigh, from a company that ought to be able to describe its own terms.
The one thing I'd add from watching this happen
Keep your own records from day one. What you paid, what came in, what closed.
A simple note on your phone is enough. Date, cost, did it turn into a job. Ten seconds per lead.
The reason is that every one of these disputes turns into two different stories about what was delivered. The contractor remembers garbage leads. The company has a report showing leads delivered. Both can be true, because delivered and useful aren't the same word.
Being the guy with his own numbers changes that conversation completely. It also tells you months earlier whether the thing is working, which is how you cancel on a calm Tuesday instead of in a bad month.
Why you're stuck buying them in the first place
Here's the part that's actually mine to say.
Nobody's first choice is renting access to customers in their own town. Guys do it because they need work now and they don't have anything of their own producing calls. It's the fastest thing available, and speed is a real feature when the calendar's empty.
But rented is rented. Stop paying, it stops. Everything you built up over two years, all that spend, doesn't leave you with an asset. There's no equity in it. That's what makes the cancellation conversation so ugly for people, more than the dollar figure. You realize you have nothing to show for the money except the jobs you already did.
A site that ranks works differently. It's slower, it's less predictable in month two, and it's genuinely worse than bought leads if you need work next week. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
What it is, is yours. The pages stay up. The reviews stay on your profile. The rankings don't switch off because a subscription lapsed.
My own terms, so I'm not just describing other people's
It'd be cheap to write this whole post and not put mine on the table.
Three month minimum, then month to month. There's no annual contract to sign and no cancellation fee. You tell me you're done, you're done at the end of that month.
You keep the site files. The domain is in your name and always was. You keep full access to your Google profile, your ads account and your lead data, because those were never mine to hold. You leave, you take your stuff with you.
It's written on the pricing page, which means you can point at it later, which is the only reason a promise like that is worth anything.
And the reason I bang on about this is the same reason that first comment ends the way it does. A guy who can't leave stops asking whether he should. That's a worse trap than any cancellation fee.
What to do this week
If you're currently buying leads, go find the terms you agreed to and read the cancellation part. Not to cancel. Just so you know what it says, today, while nothing's on fire.
If you're about to sign something, ask the three questions and save the answers somewhere.
And if you've never checked whether the pieces of your own marketing are actually in your name, that's a separate twenty minute job and it's the same underlying problem.
Trying to work out whether it makes sense to build something of your own alongside the leads you're already buying, or instead of them, get me on the phone. That's a real conversation with a real answer, and sometimes the answer is keep buying leads for another six months. Depends on how empty your calendar is.