When Buying Leads Wasn’t the Problem
Connor Stephenson runs a Farmers agency out of Spokane Valley, Washington.
Like most agents building a book on internet leads, he had already learned that buying leads is easy. Finding leads that actually turn into households is a lot harder.
Some months his cost per lead looked good on paper. Other months that same price point brought in prospects who never picked up the phone, or never had real intent to switch carriers in the first place. Without a clear, ongoing read on which zip codes and price points were actually producing, he was left guessing where to put his budget next.
Buying Leads vs. Buying the Right Leads
Connor signed on with Next Call Club in March 2025 for NCC's Lead Buying Service, putting NCC's data and filtering to work sourcing, vetting, and continuously refining the leads landing in his CRM.
Every NCC lead that started reaching Connor's team has already been through a quality check most agencies never see.
NCC verifies that the phone number on the form is real and reachable, and cuts out landlines entirely since contact rates on those are too low to justify the spend.
Behind that, a second layer of checks runs at the same time. If the same IP address is submitting form after form, it gets flagged as a data farm. Forms filled out in under ten seconds get flagged as bots. Every lead is scrubbed against a list of known TCPA litigators before it's ever dialed, and numbers that got reassigned to a new owner, or leads that have already been resold multiple times, get filtered out too.
NCC also only works with long form leads, the kind that ask for 40 plus pieces of information instead of six or eight. Filling that much out is itself a signal. Someone willing to list every vehicle, every driver, and their full carrier history is a far more serious buyer than someone who leaves most of the form blank.
"NCC coaching on contact rate, speed to dial, lead cadence, and other key metrics has helped us optimize our entire sales process. The improvements we made with NCC have carried over to every other vendor we work with, resulting in increased efficiency, stronger quote volume, and better closing ratios across the board. NCC isn't just a lead vendor, they're a true partner in helping us grow."
Connor Stephenson
- Farmers Agent, Spokane Valley, WA
The Shift That Changed the Math
Once lead quality was addressed, NCC’s data analysts turned their attention to the next growth opportunity: identifying which of Connor’s zip codes and price points were delivering the strongest results. A handful of niche zip codes stood out, and NCC built dedicated campaigns around them.
From there, the team ran a monthly optimization review, a full look at how each campaign was performing, followed by a reallocation of budget toward whichever ones were converting best.
To make this work, the pace of collaboration changed. Connor and his NCC account team started meeting more often, and every adjustment after that came from combining two sources: what NCC's optimization data showed, and what Connor's team was seeing firsthand on the phones.
That back and forth between NCC's data and Connor's own read on lead quality is what drove the growth.
From 8 to 34 Households per Month
From March through December 2025, Connor wrote $194,000 in premium and closed 80 households, about 8 households a month, running on the standard NCC lead buying setup.
From January through June 2026, once that closer collaboration kicked in, he wrote $448,000 in premium and closed 205 households, about 34 a month. That's roughly four times his 2025 pace, and it has held steady. Connor has stayed ROI positive every month since.
Across the first half of 2026, Connor bought 436 items for those 205 households. His average cost per lead came in at $10, his cost per item at $204, and his cost per sale at $433, with an ROI of about 11% on his NCC leads.
