How long should you chase a shared lead?

A shared lead is a different instrument from an enquiry that came to you, and treating them alike is what makes chase policy expensive. The same enquiry has been sold simultaneously to several contractors, each of whom paid for their own copy. Nobody is waiting to be convinced. The customer will speak to whoever reaches them first, will often book from that conversation, and the remaining copies of the lead become calls to a person who has already solved their problem.

That structure puts almost all of the value in the first minutes. The odds of reaching somebody at all fall steeply within the first half hour, and on a shared lead the decay is compounded by the competition, because every minute is also a minute in which a rival may have closed it. So the front of the chase is worth staffing seriously — an immediate first touch, by whatever channel reaches fastest, with a person available behind it.

The back of the chase is where money quietly disappears. A coordinator working a long follow-up sequence on shared leads is spending real hours on records that were resolved days ago, and the cost never appears as a line item because it is a salaried person doing something that looks like diligence. The general advice that most sales require several follow-ups is sound for enquiries you own and actively misleading here, because it was derived from pipelines where nobody else was calling the same person.

The stopping rule is therefore the part of the policy worth arguing about, and it should be written before the leads are bought rather than felt out afterwards. A workable shape: a hard cap on attempts, a short calendar window rather than an open one, a switch of channel rather than a repetition of the same one, and an explicit close-out that marks the record dead so it stops consuming attention. What makes this work is that it is a rule rather than a judgement, because judgement applied to a queue of shared leads reliably resolves as one more call.

There is a measurement problem underneath all of this that deserves stating, because it explains why no confident number is offered here. The rate at which shared leads become booked jobs has no independent measurement. Every circulating figure originates either with a party selling the leads or with a party selling the alternative to them, and both have a direction. That is not a reason to ignore the metric; it is a reason to measure your own, since your own close rate on shared leads is the only version of it that is not being marketed to you.

Measuring it is not difficult and almost nobody does it. Tag shared-lead records separately from owned enquiries, record the outcome and the elapsed time to first contact on each, and read the two populations apart after a quarter. The output is your close rate and your effective cost per booked job, and it converts the marketplace question from a debate into arithmetic.