You Just Acquired a Company With Fourteen Lead Vendors

The deal closed on a Friday. On Monday, the marketing director at the acquired brand — who is now your marketing director, reporting to a VP she has met once — sends over the list of active lead sources.

There are fourteen of them. Four are marketplaces. Three are affiliates nobody can fully explain. Two are a single person with a Google Ads account and a handshake. One is a channel partner that also refers to your largest competitor. Three have auto-renewing contracts, and one of those renews in six weeks.

None of them report on the same denominator. Two of them define a "lead" as a form fill and one defines it as a completed call. The CRM shows a blended cost per lead of $112, which is the average of numbers that are not comparable.

This is not a marketing problem. It is one of the most common and most expensive integration problems in home services roll-ups, and it has a specific shape and a specific sequence for solving it.

Why the clock matters more than the analysis

The instinct is to run a thorough six-month analysis before touching anything. Don't.

Two things degrade fast in the window after close, and both are hard to reverse:

The sales floor normalizes. Reps adapt to the lead quality they are given. When a meaningful share of volume is unqualified, closers stop working the top of the list carefully and start triaging — burning through records fast to find the live ones. That habit takes about a quarter to form and considerably longer than a quarter to break. You can replace the leads in month five and still be running a sales floor that treats every lead like a lottery ticket.

The data window closes. The acquired team's institutional knowledge about which sources were actually good walks out the door with the first departures, which typically start 60 to 90 days post-close. The person who knows that vendor #9 was only ever good in two ZIPs is the person most likely to leave first.

You have roughly 100 days. Here is how to spend them.

Phase 0 — Inventory (days 1–14)

Do not analyze anything yet. Collect.

For each of the fourteen sources, get:

• The contract. Term, auto-renew date, notice period, minimum volume commitment, and termination clause. Build a single calendar of every renewal date in the next 12 months. This alone will pay for the phase.
• The definition. What does this vendor count as a billable lead? Form fill, verified contact, connected call, booked appointment? Write it down verbatim from the agreement.
• Consent and compliance posture. Where did consent come from, is it retained at the record level, and is there an indemnification clause? Sources that cannot produce a consent record are a liability you now own — see the note on successor exposure below.
• The invoice history. Twelve months, monthly, by source. Not the blended number.
• Who owns the relationship. Name a person. Frequently this reveals that two vendors are the same company under different entities, or that the "affiliate" is a former employee.

Two things surface reliably in Phase 0. First, somewhere between two and four of the fourteen are not real sources — they are duplicates, dormant accounts still being invoiced, or a rebranded reseller of a source you already buy. Second, at least one contract has a renewal inside your window that will lock you in for another year if nobody acts.

Deliverable: a one-page source register. Fourteen rows, nine columns, no analysis.

Phase 1 — Put everything on one denominator (days 15–30)

You cannot compare sources until they are measured the same way. This is the phase most integration teams skip, and it is why so many consolidation decisions turn out to be wrong.

Stop measuring cost per lead. Measure each source on the funnel your business actually runs:

Delivered records
  → Contact rate        (reached a live person)
  → Qualified rate      (right property, right owner, real project)
  → Set rate            (appointment on the calendar)
  → Sit rate            (appointment actually happened)
  → Close rate          (signed)
  → Revenue per delivered record
  → Cost per acquisition

The two numbers that matter most are the two nobody has: sit rate and revenue per delivered record.

Sit rate is where in-home selling motions quietly lose money. A source with a strong set rate and a weak sit rate is not producing appointments — it is producing calendar entries, and it is consuming your most expensive resource, a consultant's drive time, to discover that.

Revenue per delivered record is the number that collapses the whole comparison into one figure you can rank on. A source at $180 per record producing $940 in revenue per record beats a source at $40 producing $95, and no cost-per-lead view will ever tell you that.

Expect this phase to be painful. The acquired brand's CRM will not have clean source tagging. Budget two weeks and accept 80% attribution coverage. Eighty percent of the truth now is worth more than 100% of it in month six.

Deliverable: every source ranked by revenue per delivered record, with sit rate shown alongside.

Phase 2 — Cut the bottom, protect the top (days 31–60)

Now you cut. The ranking almost always sorts into three tiers.

Tier 3 — cut immediately. Sources producing negative contribution, sources that cannot produce consent records, and the duplicates found in Phase 0. Typically five to seven of the fourteen. Serve notice against the renewal calendar you built.

Tier 2 — hold and renegotiate. Marginal contributors, and sources that are strong in a narrow geography but were being bought nationally. Many of these become viable if you restrict them to the ZIPs where they actually perform and reprice on that basis. Do not cut these yet; you need the volume while Tier 1 scales.

Tier 1 — protect and expand. Usually two or three sources. Expand these before cutting Tier 3, not after. This is the sequencing detail that decides whether the whole project succeeds.

The failure mode to avoid: cutting volume before replacing it. A sales floor that goes from 800 to 500 records a month will lose closers, and losing a closer costs more than an entire year of a bad vendor. Overlap the cut and the ramp by at least 30 days even though you will pay twice during the overlap. Budget for it explicitly so it doesn't look like a mistake on the P&L.

Phase 3 — Consolidate to a spine (days 61–100)

Fourteen sources cannot be governed. Even after cutting to six, you are running six contracts, six quality standards, six invoicing cycles, and six relationships — across every brand in the portfolio, multiplied by every future acquisition.

The target state is a small number of primary sources that can absorb volume growth, plus a deliberately maintained secondary for redundancy. Concentration is the goal; total dependency is not. A single-source demand program is one algorithm update away from a missed quarter.

What consolidation actually buys you, in order of value:

1. One quality standard, defined once and enforced everywhere, instead of six definitions of "lead."
2. One reporting spine, so portfolio-level CAC is a real number rather than a weighted average of incomparable inputs.
3. Real negotiating position, because concentrated volume gets terms that fragmented volume never will.
4. A repeatable playbook, so brand #8 takes three weeks to integrate instead of a hundred days.

That fourth one is where the compounding is. The first consolidation is expensive. It is also the last one that has to be.

The three mistakes that cost a quarter

Cutting on cost per lead. The cheapest source is frequently the least profitable, and CPL is the only metric that makes it look good. If you cut on CPL you will systematically remove your best sources and keep your worst.

Letting the acquired GM keep "their guy." There is always one vendor with a personal relationship attached, and it is always carved out of the consolidation. Sometimes that vendor is genuinely good — the Phase 1 ranking will show it. If the data does not support the carve-out, the carve-out is the exception that makes the standard unenforceable at brand #8.

Ignoring inherited compliance exposure. You acquired the entity, which means you acquired its consent chain. If sources at the acquired brand cannot produce record-level consent — the disclosure language, timestamp, IP, and originating URL — that is an open liability on your balance sheet, not the seller's. With TCPA class filings at record volume and statutory damages of $500 to $1,500 per violation, this is the item on the list that can matter more than everything above it combined. Raise it with counsel in Phase 0, not Phase 3.

What day 100 should look like

• A source register with every contract, renewal date, and termination window on one calendar
• Every source ranked on revenue per delivered record and sit rate, not CPL
• Bottom tier terminated, top tier scaled, overlap paid for on purpose
• One written quality standard that applies to every source and every brand
• Portfolio CAC that is a real number
• A documented sequence that brand #8 runs in three weeks

The measure of success is not the savings. It is that the next acquisition does not require this post.