How to hand a local business your newsletter leads without a real contract

A local publisher sends a plumber a few subscribers a month who said in a survey they need a pipe fixed. The deal was a handshake at a coffee shop: send me the names, pay me for the good ones. Then one month the plumber texts back that the leads are no good and the money quietly stops. There is nothing in writing that says what a good lead is, so the argument has no floor to stand on.

A short written agreement fixes this. Not a real contract and not a lawyer bill. One page, four terms: what counts as a qualified lead, exclusivity, turnaround, and how disputes get resolved.

Term one: define a qualified lead

Most lead deals die on this word. A qualified lead is a person who said yes to being introduced to the business, and whose contact details and the answers that qualified them exist in writing. The agreement should name the fields: name, contact method, the survey answer or answers that made this person a match, and proof the person chose the offer. A plumber who wanted emergency repairs and got someone asking about a fixture swap will call every lead bad unless the agreement says what a match looks like.

Write the definition as a checklist both sides initial. If the lead has all the fields, it counts. If it does not, it does not. This removes the judgment call that turns a payment conversation into an argument.

Term two: exclusivity

Say plainly whether each lead goes only to this business or to several. A plumber paying for exclusive leads is buying the absence of competition, so the agreement should state it. If the publisher sends the same person to three plumbers, the reader gets three calls and the buyer gets a weaker lead. One sentence settles it: exclusive to one buyer, or shared, and if shared, with how many.

Term three: turnaround

The agreement should say how fast the buyer contacts the lead and what happens to the payment if they do not. A lead that sits for two weeks is worth less to the reader and to the relationship. Set a window both sides can live with, and state that a lead the buyer never contacted is still a delivered lead. This stops the oldest dodge in the business, which is to let leads expire and then call them stale.

Term four: how disputes get resolved

Name the process before the first disagreement. A workable version: the buyer flags a bad lead within a set number of days, the publisher shows the record, and whoever is wrong fixes it. The point is not to threaten anyone. The point is that when both sides agreed on the process while things were friendly, the first bad week does not end the deal.

A template to fill in

Give both sides a record

The agreement only works if a record exists that answers the checklist. A lead-tracking record with a timestamp, the answers that qualified the lead, the offer the reader saw, and where the lead went gives both sides the same facts. On greetform, a lead is captured when a subscriber explicitly chooses an offer and provides contact details, and the record includes the consent click and the offer language the subscriber saw, which is exactly the evidence the dispute clause calls for. The publisher keeps control of the deals and the prices; the platform only routes the leads and keeps the record.

Every answer also lands on the subscriber record and syncs to Beehiiv, ActiveCampaign or Mailchimp as fields to segment on, so the publisher can show which subscribers said what without a spreadsheet hunt.

Questions before trying this