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Exclusive vs. Shared Insurance Leads: The Real Math

StrategyJanuary 22, 20265 min readBy TheInsuranceLeads.com

Agents compare lead vendors on price per lead. That is the wrong number. The number that decides whether your agency grows is cost per issued policy, and shared leads lose that comparison almost every time.

The example

Take two agents buying 1,000 Medicare leads.

Shared leadsExclusive leads
Price per lead$0.15$0.40
Total spend$150$400
Contact rate35%70%
Contacts350700
Close rate on contacts3%6%
Policies10.542
Cost per policy$14.29$9.52

The exclusive buyer spent more up front and wrote four times the business at a lower cost per policy. Now add the part the table leaves out: the shared buyer's reps spent all week hearing "you're the fifth person to call me," and the exclusive buyer's reps spent it having real conversations.

Why shared leads underperform

  • Speed becomes a race. With shared leads, whoever dials first wins. Everyone else pays for a contact who already bought.
  • Consumers get burned out. Repeated calls train the prospect to ignore unknown numbers, which lowers contact rates for every agent on the list.
  • Rep morale drops. Nothing empties a sales floor faster than a list that argues back.

When shared leads make sense

Rarely. If you are running a fully automated re-engagement campaign with almost no labor cost, very cheap shared data can pencil. For any human-dialed operation, exclusivity pays for itself.

Our position

We do not sell shared leads. Every record we deliver is sold once, to one buyer. If you want to see how exclusive data changes your numbers, start with our aged tiers and compare cost per policy against whatever you are buying now.

Run the test on your own floor

Start with a $1,500 order in any vertical and track cost per policy for one week.

Build My Order

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