Insurance Lead Vendor Evaluation Checklist: 47 Questions to Ask Before You Buy

Picking a lead vendor is one of the highest-stakes decisions an independent agency makes. The wrong pick burns a quarter of producer payroll on unreachable homeowners and stalls book growth for a year. The right pick compounds for years. Most agents pick based on a sales-rep demo and the per-lead price on the rate card, which are the two least predictive signals in the entire decision.

This is the checklist we wish every agent ran on us, on our competitors, and on any new vendor that calls them. It covers eight sections plus a scoring framework. Read it as a script for your next shortlist call. Print it. Bring it to the demo.

How to use this checklist

Pick your shortlist (typically 3-5 vendors). Schedule a 30-minute call with each. Walk every question in order. Score each section 1-5 based on the answers. Weight the sections by what matters to your agency (a high-volume call-center weights ramp time and volume highest; a consultative cross-sell shop weights exclusivity and lead quality highest). Add it up. Eliminate the bottom half. Run a 60-90 day live test with the top two.

Section 1: Lead origin and distribution (5 questions)

Where leads come from determines almost everything else. A homeowner who filled out a generic quote form on a third-party site behaves nothing like a homeowner replying to your agency's outbound email 35 days before their renewal date. Distribution (how many other agents get the same lead) is the second largest CPA driver after lead origin.

1. Where do your leads originate? Form fill on your owned site? Form fill on partner sites? Outbound to a purchased list? Outbound to an enriched proprietary list? Partnership feeds (carrier, mortgage, real estate)? Aged data revival? The answer dictates lead intent.
2. How many other agents receive the same lead? Exact number, not a range. "Up to 3" is different from "up to 6" is different from "exclusive to you only." Pin it down.
3. Are aged or recycled leads ever mixed into my fresh volume? Some marketplaces blend recycled inventory into fresh feeds without flagging it. Ask explicitly.
4. What's the maximum age of a lead you'd ever send me? 24 hours? 7 days? 30 days? Anything older than 7 days for P&C personal lines is functionally aged.
5. Can you guarantee in writing that my fresh volume will not include leads sold to other agents in the past 14 days? Most vendors will hedge here. The hedge is the answer.

Section 2: Pricing and billing (7 questions)

Per-lead price is a misleading anchor. What you actually want to know: total cost to acquire one bound policy, after all the adjacent costs (setup, minimum commitments, return denials, producer labor on unreachable leads). Ask these to get to the real number.

6. What's the per-lead price for my specific line and state? Pricing varies by both. The headline rate card is rarely the rate you'll pay.
7. Is there a setup fee, and what does it cover? Setup fees in the $500-$3,000 range are common across the category. Real setup work (domain authentication, copy approval, list enrichment, infrastructure provisioning) costs the vendor real money up front, so a setup fee isn't a flag on its own. What you want to know is whether it's itemized, what it pays for, and what you get for it.
8. What's the minimum monthly commitment? Some vendors require $500/month minimum spend regardless of volume delivered. Others bill per lead delivered with no floor. Big economic difference at low volume.
9. Are there volume discounts? At what threshold? Most marketplaces discount at $2,500+/month. Some don't. If your target spend is $1,000/month, volume tiers don't help you.
10. How do you handle excess deliveries? If you asked for 100 leads and they send 115, do you pay for the extra 15? Some vendors deliver excess free; others bill it.
11. What's the return policy? Specifically: what types of leads qualify (wrong number, fake info, out of area, off-product), what percentage of monthly volume is eligible, what's the typical approval rate, what's the window. Don't accept "we're flexible." Get the policy in writing.
12. How quickly are return credits applied? Some vendors take 30-60 days. That's working capital sitting in their account, not yours.

Section 3: Lead quality and delivery (7 questions)

Lead quality has two dimensions. Data quality (is the contact info accurate, is the homeowner real, is the renewal date right) and delivery quality (does it land in your CRM, how fast, with what fields). Both fail vendors lose deals weekly. Ask about both.

13. What fields per lead do you deliver? Name, phone, email, address, ZIP, renewal date, current carrier, current premium, line of business, intent signal, consent documentation. Fewer than 8 fields is thin. More than 12 is rare.
14. How quickly does a lead arrive after the consumer action? Form fills should hit your inbox in seconds. Outbound replies arrive as they come in. Anything delayed more than a few minutes loses contact rate.
15. What delivery channels do you support? Portal, email, SMS alert, webhook, direct API into my CRM. Webhook + API are the ones that actually save your producers time.
16. Can you integrate with my specific CRM? Agency Zoom, HubSpot, Salesforce Financial Services, Radius, AMS360, EZLynx. Ask by name. "We have an API" isn't the same as a working native integration.
17. Do you provide consent and compliance documentation per lead? TCPA exposure on auto-dialed leads without consent documentation can run six figures per violation. Get the consent trail in writing for every lead.
18. What's the average data freshness on your contact lists? Bad data = wasted dials. Good vendors refresh monthly or use real-time API enrichment.
19. If a lead's renewal date is on file, how was it obtained and how recently? Renewal-date data is gold for P&C. It's also frequently stale, guessed, or wrong. Ask the source and the refresh cadence.

Section 4: Territory and exclusivity (5 questions)

Exclusivity is the most-claimed and least-defined word in lead gen. Three vendors will tell you they offer "exclusive leads" and mean three different things. Pin down the specifics every time.

20. What does "exclusive" mean in your product specifically? Per-lead (one agent gets one lead), per-territory (one agency per geography), per-tier (exclusive tier costs more than shared), per-carrier (no two agents from the same carrier)?
21. If exclusive, exclusive against whom? Other clients of yours? Agents from other lead vendors? Agents at other carriers? Captive vs independent? Define the universe.
22. Can multiple agencies on your platform target the same ZIP code? If yes, "exclusive" doesn't mean territorial. It only means per-lead.
23. What stops you from selling a second agency in my territory next quarter? Operating policy? Contract clause? Or just a sales-rep handshake?
24. Are there carrier restrictions on who you'll serve in my territory? Some vendors won't take both Allstate and a competitor agent in the same ZIP. Others will. Ask the policy.

Section 5: Onboarding and ramp (5 questions)

Time-to-first-lead and time-to-steady-state are different numbers. Marketplace vendors can deliver same-day; outbound or data-build products take 2-6 weeks. Knowing the timeline upfront determines whether the vendor matches your cash-flow and producer-deployment plan.

25. How long from agreed scope to first lead? Marketplace vendors: same day to 48 hours. Outbound products: typically 2-4 weeks for domain authentication, copy approval, list enrichment, inbox warmup. Maverick: 21 days from agreed scope to first batch.
26. What's required from me during ramp? Approving copy? Signing off on ZIPs? Authenticating a domain? Adding webhook? Most vendors need 1-2 hours of your time spread across the ramp window.
27. What's the typical ramp from first lead to steady-state volume? Some vendors hit full volume immediately. Outbound products typically build over 30-60 days as inbox reputation accumulates.
28. Do you provide training on how to work your specific lead type? Reply leads need different handling than form-fill leads. Live transfers need different scripts than aged data. Vendors who skip training assume your team will self-teach, which is where most CPA underperformance starts.
29. Who's my point of contact during setup, and after it? Dedicated account manager? Shared pool? Self- service portal only? Tier of support typically scales with spend.

Section 6: Performance and reporting (6 questions)

Without good reporting you can't reallocate. Source-level CPA, bound rate by source, and contact rate by source are the three numbers that matter for managing a multi-source lead spend. If a vendor can't show you their share of those, you're flying blind on optimization.

30. What's the published benchmark close rate for agencies using your product? If they can't quote it, they don't measure it. Walk away or recalibrate expectations.
31. What's the bottom-quartile vs top-quartile gap? Most vendors have a 3-5x spread between best and worst agencies on the platform. Where you'll likely land depends on your team, not the lead.
32. How do you attribute bound policies back to your leads? Self-reported by agent? CRM webhook? Carrier data partnership? Self-reported is the norm. Verifiable attribution is rare and valuable.
33. Do you provide source-level CPA reporting? Showing close rate and CPA broken out by lead source so you can compare them apples-to-apples. Most agencies don't ask for this and don't get it.
34. What do agencies in your top quartile do differently from the bottom? A vendor that can answer this has watched 100+ agencies and learned the patterns. A vendor that can't is selling you blind.
35. Can I see anonymized performance data from a similar agency to mine? Same state, same line, same team size. If they have it, they'll share it. If they don't, they're newer than they're letting on.

Section 7: Service and support (5 questions)

Support quality predicts your experience more than rate cards do. When a campaign tanks, deliverability drops, or a lead feed breaks, response time is the difference between an afternoon of lost replies and a week of dead pipeline.

36. What support channels do you offer? Email only? Phone? Slack channel (rare and great)? In-portal chat? Self-service docs?
37. What's your response time SLA? "Within 24 hours" is the floor. Sub-5-minute response (Maverick's standard via Slack) is the ceiling.
38. Who do I escalate to if my assigned rep can't help? Named contact? Generic escalation queue? Founder access at certain spend tiers?
39. Do I get a dedicated account manager? At what spend tier? What does the AM actually do for me beyond taking calls?
40. If your platform has an outage, how do I find out and what's the comp policy? Outages happen. How they're communicated and credited matters.

Section 8: Contract and commitment terms (7 questions)

The contract section is where surprises live. Read every clause before signing. These questions surface the most common agent-unfriendly terms.

41. Is there a contract? What length? Month-to- month, 90-day, annual, multi-year. Anything longer than 90 days locks you into a vendor before you can fairly evaluate.
42. What's the cancellation process? Written notice? Notice period (30/60/90 days)? Cancellation fees?
43. Are there penalties for cancellation? Some vendors charge early-termination fees that erase any savings from switching.
44. Can I pause without canceling? Useful for seasonal businesses or producer turnover. Some vendors allow it freely; some only at certain spend tiers.
45. What happens to my territory or data if I cancel? Does the territory open up immediately? Hold for 30/60/90 days? Does my historical lead data stay accessible?
46. Do you have a written data privacy policy? Where does my data live? Who has access? What happens on breach?
47. Who's the actual legal entity I'm contracting with? Sometimes the brand on the site is a subsidiary of a larger holding company with different financial standing. Check the legal name on any agreement.

The 3 questions vendors don't want to answer

These three sit outside the 47 because they're filters, not scoring inputs. The way a vendor responds to each is diagnostic on its own. Watch for hedging, topic-changing, or a sudden push to schedule a follow-up call.

1. Can I talk to 3 current customers without you on the call? Classic reference-check filter. Vendors with weak product hate it because the customer who took your call without the sales rep present will tell you things the sales rep wouldn't. Vendors with strong product set it up inside a week.
2. What's your 12-month client retention rate? A real number, not a range. Lead-gen retention rates above 80% over 12 months are excellent. Below 50% is common in marketplace categories and indicates lots of agencies aren't getting the value they expected.
3. What's the median CPA across your agency book? Not average. Median. Median is the typical experience. Average gets skewed by a few superstars or a few disasters. If a vendor only quotes average, ask for median. If they dodge median, they don't measure it or don't want you to see it.

How to score and decide

Convert your 47 question answers into a scorecard. Each of the 8 sections scores 0-5 based on the quality of the answers (specific + structural + verifiable = 5; vague + sales-driven + unverifiable = 1). Total possible: 40.

Then weight the sections based on what matters most to your agency. A high-volume call-center weights ramp time + delivery speed highest. A consultative cross-sell shop weights exclusivity + lead quality highest. A new agency weights pricing + commitment terms highest.

Apply the weights, sum across sections, and you'll have a single number per vendor. Don't pick on the score alone (a vendor scoring 35 with a fatal flaw in one section is worse than one scoring 28 with no fatal flaws). Use the scorecard to eliminate clear losers, then make the final call on the top 2 based on a live 60-90 day test.

Where Maverick scores on the checklist (honest scorecard)

We score ourselves the same way. Here's where we stand section-by-section, with the honest weaknesses called out first.

Two takeaways. First, no vendor is a 5 across the board. Anyone who claims that is overselling. Second, the right pick depends on which sections matter most for your agency profile. Maverick is structurally strong on exclusivity, lead quality, and CPA economics, and structurally weaker on ramp speed and immediate same-day volume. That's the honest tradeoff.

Common evaluation mistakes to avoid

• Optimizing for per-lead price alone. The $7 lead and the $30 lead can have identical effective CPA. See our breakdown of how much insurance leads actually cost for the math.
• Trusting the "exclusive" label without specifics. Always ask: exclusive against whom, per-lead or per-territory, what stops more agencies from being added. See our deep dive on shared vs exclusive insurance leads.
• Signing a 12-month contract before live-testing. Run two vendors in parallel for 60-90 days. CPA comparisons based on actual numbers beat sales-call promises every time.
• Skipping the reporting questions. Without source-level CPA reporting, you can't reallocate. A vendor who can't show you their share of the funnel won't help you improve it.
• Ignoring support response time. When something breaks, sub-day response time is the difference between an afternoon of lost replies and a week of dead pipeline.
• Letting the sales rep set the agenda. If you don't drive the conversation with your checklist, the rep will drive it with their pitch. The pitch is always rehearsed. Your questions aren't.

What to do with the scorecard

After running 3-5 vendors through this checklist, you'll have a weighted scorecard and a gut read on each vendor's transparency. Eliminate the bottom half. Pick the top 2 for a 60-90 day live test. Track these three numbers separately by source for the full test window:

1. Contact rate. What percentage of leads delivered did your producers actually reach a real human on? Below 40% is bad. Above 70% is excellent.
2. Bound rate. What percentage of leads delivered turned into a bound policy? Industry benchmark for shared P&C: 3-5%. For exclusive: 10-15%. For Maverick exclusive renewal-window reply: 10-25%.
3. Effective CPA. Total spend on the source divided by bound policies from the source. This is the only number that matters at the end of the 90 days.

Reallocate based on these three numbers, not the sales-call promises. Most agencies discover after a fair head-to-head test that the cheap-per-lead vendor is the most expensive on a CPA basis, and the higher-per-lead exclusive product is actually cheaper to scale on.

For the full lineup of vendors typically on a shortlist (EverQuote, QuoteWizard, SmartFinancial, Datalot, Hometown Quotes, ZipQuote, and Maverick), see our best insurance lead companies 2026 buyer's guide with vendor-by-vendor breakdowns scored on similar criteria.

Sources and further reading

• EverQuote, QuoteWizard, SmartFinancial, Datalot, Hometown Quotes, ZipQuote agent-facing pricing and program pages (May 2026).
• Insurance Lead Reviews (vendor program details, pricing tiers, agent reports).
• FCC TCPA guidance (consent + dialer compliance reference).
• Deloitte 2026 Insurance Industry Outlook (CAC benchmarks by channel and line).
• Maverick companion pieces: best insurance lead companies 2026, shared vs exclusive insurance leads, how much do insurance leads cost, vs EverQuote, vs QuoteWizard, vs SmartFinancial.