When I first crossed over into the performance marketing and lead generation industry, the owner of the company I now own, Matt Marsh, suggested I attend Leads Con in Las Vegas. Matt graciously set me up with more industry buds, this time Dave Kuehl. At the time, Dave was almost a 10-year veteran in performance marketing, with a knowledge base that dwarfed mine. I was beyond excited to learn how Dave makes money. Transitioning from a product-oriented world, foodservice dinnerware, made my brain always rotate to the product. The product was the star in my universe, and I was ready to learn about Dave’s.
Dave and I met outside the show, and after pleasantries, I peppered him with questions.
“Dave, do you generate real-time webform leads?”
“No,” Dave said flatly.
I paused. “Okay. Do you do live inbound call transfers?”
“No,” he replied.
Next question will be a winner: “Tell me about your real-time coreg leads.”
Dave said, “We have them, but it isn’t a focus.”
I looked at him, slightly confused. In an industry that constantly hypes up real-time delivery and instant gratification, Dave was completely unfazed. He looked at me and said, “Jim, we focus on data leads. Aged data.”
Before I could ask him why he was playing in the “unsexy” end of the pool, Dave broke down his entire operational worldview in a single phrase that completely reframed how I think about performance marketing.
“Jim, it’s all about chances at bat. My belief is simple: the more chances at bat you have, the more opportunities you have to win.”
It was a beautiful, raw piece of sports logic that stripped away all the marketing fluff. It reminded me of something I told a past colleague who said he focused on quality over quantity when making sales calls.
I said to him, “That is great; I’m just not smart enough to know which call is going to be quality until I make it, so I am going to make a lot of calls.” The numbers game was already in my head; Dave drove the point home.
Dave understood a fundamental mathematical truth that most executives miss: Strategy is great, and marketing execution matters - but at the end of the day, the sheer volume of your leads is the ultimate insurance policy for your revenue.
Here is why raw lead volume behaves differently from everything else in your pipeline.
Most business owners are terrified of volume because they look at it through the lens of human labor. They see a massive spreadsheet of 10,000 aged leads and think, “That’s just a mountain of work.” Instead, they prefer to buy 20 premium inbound call transfers a week.
Buying 20 premium transfers feels great because the instant gratification is high. But from a pure statistical standpoint, a low-volume strategy is incredibly fragile.
Think of it through Dave’s baseball framework. If you only get 3 at-bats a week, what happens if you get an umpire with a terrible strike zone on Tuesday? What happens if a gust of wind catches a ball that should have been a home run on Thursday? If you only have 3 at-bats, a single patch of bad luck or a minor operational hiccup completely destroys your entire week’s average.
In sales, that looks like this:
● Lead # 1 is driving through a tunnel, and the call drops.
● Lead # 2 filled out the form, but then they went on vacation and are not reachable in Bora Bora.
● Lead # 3 is an incredible prospect, but your top sales rep had a fight with his spouse that morning and completely blew the delivery.
When your lead volume is low, random human variance determines your corporate revenue. You are walking a tightrope, and you have zero margin for error.
When you shift your strategy to focus on lead volume, you stop praying for luck and start relying on the law of large numbers.
If you feed your system 5,000 data leads, individual human bad luck completely evaporates. It doesn’t matter if 50 people hang up on you. It doesn’t matter if 200 numbers go straight to voicemail. It doesn’t matter if a few of your sales reps are having an off day.
Why? Because across a large enough data set, human behavior standardizes into predictable mathematical distributions.
When you own the data volume, you own the entire ecosystem. You have enough raw material to let the distribution curve do the heavy lifting for you. Out of 5,000 leads, a fixed percentage is guaranteed to be in the exact serendipitous window of needing your product right now. You don’t have to guess where they are; you just have to have enough at-bats to hit them.
There is an even deeper reason why lead volume wins: the asset value of the data itself.
When you purchase a high-premium, low-volume lead, you are renting an event. You are paying a massive premium for a fleeting moment of intent. The second that call ends or that real-time window closes, the value of that transaction drops to near zero if they don’t buy.
But when you buy data volume, you aren’t just buying an at-bat today. You are building a permanent corporate fortress.
If you buy 10,000 aged leads and close a fraction of a percent on the first pass, you aren’t left with empty pockets. You are left with a massive, structured database of thousands of validated consumers who have a history of interest in your vertical. That file becomes an appreciating asset for your brand.
While your competitors are sitting around waiting for the phone to ring, a massive volume of leads allows your marketing department to launch multi-channel asset plays that cost virtually nothing:
● You can drop the data into systematic email nurture sequences that educate prospects over 90 days.
● You can deploy low-cost, automated SMS drips to pull passive hand-raisers back into active conversations.
● You can pipe the entire data file into Meta or Google as a custom audience to serve hyper-targeted banner ads to an audience you already own.
CPA, or cost per acquisition, is the holy grail of making money. The less it costs a company to acquire a new customer, the more profit the company realizes at the end of the month.
Most industries have a static CPA; that is, it doesn’t fluctuate wildly based on the type of marketing. What fluctuates is the cost of the lead.
If a vertical has a $1000 CPA, and call transfers are $100, for every 10 calls, a business realizes one close.
In the same vertical, the same CPA, a company buys aged leads at $0.10. For the same $1000, a business gets 10,000 leads. Close one, and there is the $1000 CPA.
But here is where it gets fun. Is it easier to get one more hit in 9 chances at a bat, or 9,999 chances at bat? Even Babe Ruth himself would choose 9,999 at-bats. And let’s be honest, most sales floors are not filled with numerous Great Bambinos. Finding one more deal in 9,999 leads drops the CPA from $1000 to $500 instantly. Imagine if a business could cut every cost by half – this is exactly what happens when properly working aged leads.
Call transfers are quick and easy – and we sell a lot of them at The Leads Warehouse. It is a great way for a new company to get reps on the phone with a limited tech stack. When a new tax or debt company calls me and says “the crew starts next week”, my advice is the same. Get people on the phone with call transfers, and I can have you talking to consumers who need help right away. This is a great way to train, practice scripts, and close a few deals in the process.
Then I pull out the playbook Dave gave me and talk data. While running the call transfers, get your tech stack set up and integrate the data leads. In particular, aged data leads.
To build sustainable, profitable, long-term revenue, data volume is king.
Dave’s “Chances at Bat” rule is a reminder that sales, at its absolute core, is a numbers game. The business that commands the most data surface area has the numbers to survive market shifts, protect against sales floor turnover, and create predictable, compounding growth.
Stop trying to hit a grand slam on a handful of expensive pitches. Build an infrastructure that can handle volume, get your data asset numbers up, and take as many swings at the ball as humanly possible.
The averages never lie. Babe Ruth didn’t set the home run record in year one; he set it by playing 22 years. That is volume of work.
How much raw data surface area does your company actually own right now? Are you relying on a tiny pool of premium traffic, or are you building a permanent database asset? Let's talk about the math of volume in the comments below.
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