Stop Asking Your Agency for More Leads. Ask for This Instead.

The monthly report says leads are up 40 percent and cost per lead is down. The site calendar is empty. Both statements are true, and the first one caused the second.

Volume is easy to buy

Ask an agency for more leads at a lower cost and you will get exactly that. A broad audience, a generic creative, a price hook, and a form that asks for a phone number and nothing else. The enquiries arrive from people who typed a number to see a brochure and will never visit a site. The report improves every month. The sales team's week does not.

The market does not reward volume

Across India's top seven cities, home sales fell to 90,715 units in the April to June quarter of 2026, down 6 percent on a year earlier, while new launches rose 7 percent to about 1,06,000. In Bengaluru, roughly 21,700 homes launched against about 15,300 sold. Every enquiry a developer buys is now competing with a year of alternatives the same buyer can see on the same portal. A cheap lead in that market is a buyer who has not chosen anything, including you.

More leads is rarely the problem

Terray's About page describes the moment a developer reaches for the more-leads brief: "When sales don't move as expected, the answer isn't always more leads. The real challenge could lie in the product, positioning, pricing, marketing or execution." Five places the problem can sit. Marketing is one of them, and it is rarely the first.

The brief that produces site visits

Change the unit of success from leads to qualified visits and bookings, and write the definitions down before the first rupee is spent.

• A lead is an enquiry with a budget in the project's band, a timeline inside six months and a corridor preference that includes yours. Anything else is a contact.

• A site visit is a scheduled, attended walk-through, tagged to its source in the CRM.

• The reporting line is visits per lakh spent and bookings per visit. Not cost per form fill.

• The creative carries the project's one-sentence positioning, so the enquiries it attracts are already filtered.

• Channel partner referrals are tracked as a source alongside paid media, because they usually outperform it.

Two things to fix before the media budget

Upstream, a project with no positioning attracts everyone and convinces no one. The ads can only be as specific as the story behind them. Downstream, Harvard Business Review's audit of 2,241 companies found 23 percent never responded to a web enquiry at all, and the average response took 42 hours. A developer whose pre sales desk is losing a quarter of its enquiries does not need more enquiries.

How to judge the agency

On site visits and bookings attributed to its work, reported from your CRM, not from its dashboard. An agency that resists reporting on visits, or cannot say which creative produced the visitors who booked, is optimising the number it is paid on rather than the one you need. Say so in the retainer.

Buy visits, not volume

Lead generation works when it sits in the middle of a system, with positioning in front of it and pre sales behind it, and when the brief asks for the thing the developer actually needs. The founder's letter on the Terray site puts the distinction in one line: "what genuinely moves a project, and what simply creates activity." A leads report is activity. A full site calendar is movement.

If your current brief says more leads, rewrite it before the next renewal.