The internet lead problem.

What they were experiencing

A brokerage was buying internet leads at a volume the office had never handled. Portals had trained buyers to enquire on anything, from anywhere, at eleven at night. The agents were good at the part of the job that happens in person and had no system for the part that now happened first.

Leads went to whoever was in the office. Follow-up was a sticky note. A lead that did not answer twice was, functionally, deleted.

What we believed then

That the problem was speed and persistence, and that a cadence would fix it. Call fast, call often, keep calling. We built a contact schedule and measured attempts.

What worked

Speed did work, and the effect was larger than anyone in the office expected. Assigning every lead to a named person worked. Writing down what the customer said, so the next conversation could start from it, worked — and was the single cheapest change we made.

What didn’t

The cadence, past about the third attempt. Contacts with no reason attached did not produce conversations; they produced opt-outs and a slowly worsening reputation. We were measuring attempts, which is an activity, and congratulating ourselves on a number that had no relationship to closings.

We also optimised appointments. The agents duly booked more of them, and a smaller proportion of people arrived. Nobody was cheating — they were hitting the number we asked for.

What we’d do now

Require a structured reason on every contact and refuse the ones that have none. Record consent per channel rather than assuming a form submission is permission for everything forever. Measure show rate beside appointment rate on the same screen, so the two cannot be discussed separately. And report by lane — a buyer eighteen months out is not a failed transaction.

What survived

Three things came out of that brokerage and are in every ARK engagement today. Speed as a service level rather than an instruction. A named owner on every inquiry. And the customer record as a continuous story, so nobody has to start over. Everything else — the cadence, the attempt counting, the appointment target — we stopped doing, and the reason we stopped is on this page rather than quietly deleted.