Link Leads Blog · August 19, 2026
A life agent shared his complete week's production working a single $500 batch of aged calling leads — dials, appointments, shows, closes, and premium. Here's the funnel math stage by stage, and what a whole agency running the same play could look like, modeled with the assumptions out in the open.
Jake S. is a life insurance agent at a 15-agent agency. He bought a batch of 500 aged calling leads, worked them on a power dialer for one week, and shared his numbers with us with his permission. Here is the whole funnel:
One agent, one week, one batch. That's the honest scope of this data — it is not an average, not a guarantee, and not what every buyer sees. Results on aged data swing widely with state mix, age band, script, dialer discipline, and plain luck. What one real week is good for is showing the shape of the funnel, so you can compare your own stages against it.
Divide the $500 data cost through each stage of the funnel and the economics get concrete:
Two honest footnotes on that last line. First, ALP is annualized premium, not income — an agent's commission is a percentage of it, and chargebacks on early lapses claw some back, so translate to take-home with your own contract before you get excited. Second, data cost isn't the whole spend: a week of an agent's time and a dialer seat are real costs the $500 doesn't include. The cost-per-contact spreadsheet method is the fuller way to track it.
3.3 dials per record is where the appointments came from. A list dialed once is a list mostly unworked — connect rates on any cold list live in the second and third attempts at different times of day. If your team dials a batch once and declares it dead, you're paying for 500 records and working 150. Spreading attempts across day-parts is the cheapest optimization that exists.
The 46% show rate is the number most worth attacking. Jake booked 80 and sat with 37. Every no-show already cost the dials to book it, so confirmation texts the morning of, and a same-day rebook attempt on every no-show, raise this stage's yield without buying a single additional record.
A 32% close rate on kept appointments is the skill stage. Data gets a prospect in the chair; it doesn't close them. The same 37 shows in different hands produce very different weeks — which is exactly why the modeled numbers below carry a spread instead of copying Jake's line fifteen times.
Everything in this section is arithmetic on stated assumptions, not observed results. Assume an agency puts all 15 agents on the same play: 500 aged calling leads each, worked for one week at roughly Jake's dial discipline. Assume individual results land in a band of 15% either side of Jake's week — some agents book tighter, some close lighter. Then:
The point of the model isn't the headline total — it's that the funnel compounds linearly with seats only if the dial volume holds per seat. An agency's real constraint is rarely the data; it's whether all 15 agents actually put 1,600 dials into their batch. The agent who makes 400 dials into 500 records didn't get a worse list; they ran a quarter of the play.
The whole reason our calling leads have a 100-lead, $100 minimum is so this exact experiment is cheap to run at your own desk before you scale it to a team. Every record is from a fresh 2026 batch with a cell number, age, state, and capture date. Pull the free 100-row sample to inspect the data first, run your own week, put your numbers next to Jake's stage by stage, and only then decide what a 15-seat version is worth. The ROI calculator lets you plug in your own close rate and premium instead of anyone else's.