What a named lead changes, and what it does not

"A dedicated senior lead" is a line every agency prints, and a buyer has no way to check it before signing. It is the part of an offer where it is easiest to write words that mean nothing, and hardest to contest afterwards.

This article therefore tries to make it checkable. It describes what a named contact changes mechanically — a decision lead time, a place where trade-offs get made, a person holding the whole context — and it says, with the same precision, what it does not change.

What it does not change is longer than what it does. The work does not go faster, the market is no kinder, costs per enquiry do not fall because somebody more experienced is looking at them, and no decision becomes good merely by having been taken quickly.

The top tier also adds two families of service the others did not carry: IT consulting and support, and brand protection. They have one thing in common that explains their presence here rather than elsewhere — they are the only two whose absence stops a business rather than slowing it.

A business working with a developer, an advertising agency, an IT supplier and a printer does not have four suppliers: it has four suppliers and an unbudgeted coordination post, occupied by somebody whose job it is not.

That post is nearly always held by the owner. It consists of repeating the same context four times, arbitrating technical disagreements one has no means of judging, and discovering incompatibilities at the moment they block something.

The real cost appears on no invoice, which is exactly why it is never corrected. It is measured in owner-hours and postponed decisions, and it grows with the number of suppliers rather than with the volume of work.

The test for whether that post exists in your company is simple: count, over the past month, how many times you passed information from one supplier to another. If the number is over five, you already hold that post, unpaid, on top of your own. Count as well the times you had to settle between two contradictory technical opinions without being able to verify either: that is the most expensive part of the post, because a decision taken in those conditions is paid for later and rarely by whoever caused it.

Every business we audit has a backup. Almost none has a tested restore, and those are two different things carrying the same word in conversation.

A backup is a file somewhere. A restore is an exercise: take last week’s backup, put it back on a machine, check the data is there and correct. Until that exercise has been done, what you own is a hypothesis rather than a guarantee.

The reason it is almost never done is not technical: it is that it returns nothing on the day it is done, and it asks half a day of somebody with better things to do. It is a textbook case of a decision nobody takes as long as it belongs to nobody.

That is precisely what a named lead changes here, and it can be checked without taking our word for it: ask for the date of the last restore test. An answer with a date is proof; an answer explaining that backups run every day is an admission.

The word is used everywhere and denotes nothing checkable. We give it an operational definition: somebody who has already watched the same situation fail, and who can therefore say no beforehand rather than afterwards.

That definition excludes what the word usually suggests. It says nothing about years served, qualifications or job title. It speaks of a stock of observed mistakes, which is the only thing a client actually buys when paying for experience.

We do not publish what that person costs, and we publish no salary gap. Those figures are not available for this market, and the only ones we hold are our own payroll — real data about identifiable people, which we will not put in an article to make a commercial argument more convincing.

What can be said without a number is the structural constraint: an experienced person cannot follow twenty clients. The number of accounts they carry is therefore the real variable, and it is the question to put to any agency selling a dedicated lead — including us. An evasive answer to that question tells you everything: when the number is not known it is not capped, and a dedicated contact carrying thirty accounts is a shared contact with a different job title.

At this level a named person carries the whole: acquisition, what is being built, the infrastructure running it and the brand naming it. They hold the calendar, arbitrate conflicts between workstreams, and sign the monthly report that serves as the agenda.

What we refuse first: we do not sell this tier to a business with nothing to arbitrate. When the meeting ends three months running without a decision, we propose stepping down — the only one of our four refusals that costs us a recurring subscription rather than a project.

We also refuse to take decisions that are yours. We say what we would do and why, and what that assumes; changing positioning or discontinuing a range remains an owner’s decision, and a supplier who takes it turns advice into substitution.

Finally, we do not announce better results because the tier costs more. Cost per enquiry depends on your market, not on our org chart, and a higher fee buys faster decisions, not more favourable numbers. Writing otherwise would be selling the one thing we cannot deliver.