If you’re spending money on leads, chances are you’re losing more of your budget than you realize — and not because your offer isn’t converting.
Across many campaigns, we have seen 20–30% of lead spend quietly wasted on submissions that never had a real chance: invalid numbers, resold leads, disqualified geography, compliance risks, or simply bad timing.
It’s not always easy to catch — and if you’re finding out after the lead hits your dialer or CRM, it’s already too late.
The problem with post-processing
Many teams attempt to solve this issue downstream by auditing leads after the fact, adjusting vendor relationships, or updating CRM logic on a weekly basis. But by then, you’ve already paid for the lead. Maybe your agent already called. Maybe you’ve paid for a few redials. And perhaps you’re left wondering why the conversion rate dipped this week.
The problem isn’t how fast you call — it’s whether the lead should’ve been called in the first place.
A frustration turned into infrastructure.
This was a constant pain point for Eric Evans while leading performance at Hypertarget. He kept running into the same issue: bad leads slipping through, good agents burning out, and campaign performance suffering for reasons that weren’t obvious at first glance.
So, he built a solution internally — a system that could filter, suppress, or prioritize leads before they reached the dialer. Over time, that evolved into what is now used in Pipes — not just by marketers, but by many lead sellers as well.
Several lead companies now use Pipes as their first stop after collecting a lead, treating it like an air traffic control system that manages incoming leads, applies logic, and routes only the cleanest data forward. It’s become a way to prevent waste, not just manage it.
It doesn’t take much to save 20%
Whether you’re buying, selling, or working a lead pipeline, adding a layer of real-time optimization can eliminate a surprising chunk of inefficiency. It doesn’t require overhauling your tech stack or changing how you run your campaigns — it’s about catching the issues before they cost you.
✅ Quick Checklist: What Should You Be Filtering Before the Dialer?
- ☐ Duplicate checks (within and across vendors/campaigns)
- ☐ DNC & TCPA compliance (federal and state-level rules)
- ☐ Geo-targeting (filter by state, area code, or campaign restrictions)
- ☐ Bad or malformed phone numbers
- ☐ Submission timestamps (flagging leads submitted outside your calling hours)
- ☐ Vendor/source scoring (are some sources consistently low quality?)
- ☐ Call scheduling logic (delay or defer based on user-supplied preferences)
- ☐ Lead velocity control (to prevent flooding agents or overspending in real-time)
If you’re already thinking about these things, you’re ahead of the game. If not, it’s worth considering how much could be saved by putting better control systems upstream — before the lead ever reaches your team.
And if you can’t implement that into your systems, Pipes Optimizer can do it for you.
