How we check leads
Good leads should reach your sales and marketing teams ready to use. The LeadScale Engine checks records against your agreed requirements before delivery, combining automated validation, specialist verification, suppression and, for business contacts on managed Services programmes, human review.
The checks behind a usable lead
- Data hygiene. Check required fields and formats, and screen out fake names, nonsense entries, profanity, spam indicators and other suspicious patterns.
- Contact verification. Where required, use specialist services to check email addresses, telephone numbers and addresses beyond basic formatting.
- Specification, duplicates and suppression. Check whether the contact meets your targeting criteria, apply repeat-response and account caps, and screen against your customer data or exclusion lists.
- Human reverification. Where required by the client’s agreed processing rules, a reviewer checks details or handles records that need additional investigation.
We agree the criteria with you: the audience you want, the information each record must contain, the checks it should pass and the records you do not want delivered. A contact can have valid details but still be unsuitable because their role, company, location or account does not meet your specification. For example, a lead submitted as “IT Director” would pass a brief for IT directors and above. If the person’s LinkedIn profile shows they are an IT systems administrator, we correct the job title first, and the lead then fails the brief. Company details such as size and industry are checked against outside sources, such as the company’s website and LinkedIn, before they are judged against the brief.
The Engine can also use data you provide, including CRM records, target-account lists and suppression files. That lets us check incoming leads against information you already hold, rather than treating each submission in isolation.
The order of the checks matters. A duplicate or out-of-scope record can be stopped before a paid verification or enrichment lookup. A questionable result can be held for review, while a suitable record moves on to the next stage. Our Technical Services team works with you to design and configure that logic.
These checks can run as a simple step before CRM delivery or at several points in a composed journey. For example, a record may be validated at capture, checked against client data, enriched where useful and then routed to the right CRM or nurture flow. See lead validation and ecosystem orchestration for the wider capabilities.
What happens when a record does not pass?
Some issues can be corrected before delivery, such as a field that needs updating or standardising. Others mean the record should be rejected, held for investigation or sent through a different route. We agree those decisions with you and keep an audit trail of the checks and outcomes. Across our programmes, delivered records have historically averaged over 99% accuracy against specification.
For managed Services programmes, leads that fail the agreed checks are not billed. The reason for a failure is recorded, so you can distinguish unusable contact details from a record that simply falls outside your targeting requirements.
Historically, around 25% of publisher-submitted records have failed LeadScale checks before billing. The exact result will vary by programme, source and specification.
Apply the same thinking to your own data sources
The Engine can check records from your website forms, webinar platforms, CRM, media partners and other connected sources. You can use these capabilities within a LeadScale-managed programme or as part of a journey run by your own team.
For example, SmartForms can help catch fake or nonsense entries at the point of submission. Other checks can follow later, once records have been matched against your existing data or passed through additional systems. Each stage is configured around what the next step needs.
What a 557-lead audit revealed
In a 2023 audit, we reviewed 557 leads from one publisher against a campaign targeting director-level contacts and above at 1,279 named accounts in the US and Canada.
We found that 130 records (23%) did not meet the specification. Of the 427 that would otherwise have been accepted, 239 (56%) needed correction.
That distinction matters. Some records should not enter the sales process at all; others can become usable with the right checks and corrections. We also looked at account coverage, because good individual records do not necessarily mean a campaign is reaching enough of its target companies.
23% rejected
More than half of the rejected records fell outside the target countries.
56% of leads that would have been accepted needed correction
17% of target accounts reached
Account-level volume controls can help distribute responses more evenly across a target list.
These figures are from the 2023 audit of 557 leads described above.
You define the outcome. We compose the journey.
See what your lead data is really worth
Send us a sample from a recent programme. We will agree what to check, explain which records meet your specification, which need correction and which should be excluded. If you have a target-account list, we can also review coverage and discuss where better checks or routing could improve the journey.