What a seed caught, in the words of the teams who planted it.
Three examples below: a coaching pattern, and two named partner-vetting customers who share their results in their own words.
How coaching teams use a seed to audit partner performance.
A lead-generation company coaching its partners on follow-up cadence had a recurring problem: there was no reliable way to know whether a new partner was actually working leads the way they'd committed to — until a client complained. Their fix was to run a seed through a partner's normal intake flow shortly after onboarding, then pull the seed's activity a week later and compare it against their own cadence standard.
First touch time, number of attempts, days before contact was closed — what had been an hour-long manual report became a single pull from the Assumed inbox. Partners whose actual follow-up was far below what they'd committed to were identified and corrected before the pattern cost a client relationship.
“We can see in a week what would have taken a month to learn the hard way.” — Partner operations lead, lead-generation firm
iRelo
“If a client believes another client is double-selling their leads, that issue takes precedence over everything else.”— Moriah Smith, client management & sales, iRelo
iRelo has sold leads since 2005. Before Assumed, checking whether a partner was reselling or double-quoting leads meant a burner-phone app, a rotation of expiring throwaway email addresses, and an Excel sheet to keep it all straight — expensive per test and capped at roughly one partner tested a day.
Now iRelo runs a test lead through its partner network daily, and retests any partner that raises a flag. A first offense gets a warning and a weekly retest; a second gets the partner removed from the campaign for good.
Results
- Tested its entire partner network and removed partners caught double-quoting leads
- Replaced a manual, one-partner-a-day process with daily coverage across the whole network
- Extended the same seed data to coach partners on contact cadence and slow response times
Advance Client Solutions
“Like having a wrench — you don’t use it daily, but it’s there when needed.”— George, buyer, Advance Client Solutions
ACS suspected that leads it had rejected and never paid for were still being worked by a partner downstream — a problem compounded by the fact that stolen leads carry no one-to-one consent certificate. They seeded their lead lists with Assumed phone numbers that were never billed to the partner, then watched.
Within hours of rejecting a lead, the seeded contact started receiving calls and emails. The source was identified and cut off quickly. Testing with multiple numbers also confirmed the opposite: most of ACS's partners were clean, which was its own kind of peace of mind.
Results
- Identified and removed a lead-stealing agent within hours of first rejecting a lead
- Validated that the majority of partners were handling rejected leads correctly
- Kept Assumed on standing retainer for ongoing partner due diligence