Who Should You Call First? How the Lead List Builds and Ranks Itself
Save your EDDM routes and the businesses in your mail area are already found, scored and ordered. Here is exactly where they come from, what the grade means, and where it should be overruled.
The worst hour in this business is the first one. You have a card, twelve empty squares, a mail date, and a browser tab open on Google Maps.
Three hours later you have twenty-five business names, eight phone numbers, four email addresses you had to dig out of contact pages, and no idea which of them is worth calling first. That is not a prospecting workflow. It is data entry with a deadline attached, and it is where most first cards quietly die.
So the platform does it. The moment you save your EDDM routes, the list is already there — no form, no button, nothing to discover.
This post is the mechanism, in full, because “we find your leads” is a claim and you should not take claims from a software company on trust.
Where the businesses come from
Google Places, searched by category against the routes you selected.
Not a bought list. Not a scrape of some aggregator. The actual businesses operating in the area your card is going to mail to, which is the only population that matters — a roofer four towns over is not a prospect no matter how good their reviews are.
The search runs across roughly a dozen categories that historically buy community card spots:
roofing · HVAC · plumbing · dentistry · chiropractic · landscaping · pest control · auto repair · restaurants · salons and med-spas · real estate · insurance
Those categories are not a guess about who might buy. They are the categories that show up on live community cards, which is a different and better question.
Results are deduplicated — by provider ID first, then by normalised business name, because the same plumber appears three times in most local datasets under three spellings.
What the score is built from
Every business gets a score from 0 to 100, built only from signals that are actually visible before you have spoken to anyone:
| Signal | Why it is in there |
|---|---|
| How many reviews they have | A sign they are established and already spend on getting found |
| A rating between about 3.8 and 4.8 | Good but still hungry. A perfect 5.0 off eight reviews tells you nothing |
| Has a website | They already spend money on being findable |
| Has a phone number | Table stakes. You cannot call what you cannot dial |
| What kind of business it is | Roofers buy these cards more often than nail salons do |
| Sits inside your selected routes | Their customers are the households getting the card |
Review count is deliberately flattened out at the top end. Without that, a business with 900 reviews would drown out everything else — and a 900-review business is usually a regional chain that buys its advertising through an agency, not the local owner who says yes to a $500 square.
What the grade actually means
Each lead gets an A, B or C. The grade compares each business against the others on your own list — it is not a pass mark.
That distinction is the whole design, and it exists because the obvious approach failed in a way worth describing.
The first version used fixed cutoffs — A at 70 and above, B at 45. Run against a real campaign’s 468 leads, it produced 212 A grades, 25 Bs, and zero Cs. Not a ranking. A participation trophy.
The reason was not a bad setting. Google’s top results are already the established businesses in a town, so nearly everything the search finds looks good on paper. Marking against a fixed pass mark was always going to give nearly everything an A.
So the grade means one thing only: call this one before the others.
- Top 20% of your workable leads → A
- Next 40% → B
- The rest → C
Ties break on the score itself, so two businesses with the same number always get the same letter. And there is one hard floor: a lead with no phone number can never be an A, because you cannot call first what you cannot call at all.
A campaign with fewer than a dozen usable leads has too few to rank against each other, so it falls back to fixed marks set high enough that a five-lead campaign does not turn into five As again.
Every grade shows its reasoning
This is the part that decides whether the ranking is useful or just decorative.
A lead never shows you a bare letter. It shows you why: “120 reviews · has website · roofing buys often.” You can read the reasoning and disagree with it, which is the point — you know your town and the algorithm does not.
An unexplained number would be worse than no ranking at all, because you would either follow it blindly or ignore it entirely, and neither is the behaviour you want from a starting order.
The contact details
Roughly half the businesses Google returns have a website and no listed email. Hunting for that address is exactly the errand the whole thing exists to remove.
So after the search finishes, every business with a website and no email gets
one read of its own site — the homepage, then the usual contact paths — for
an address and any linked social profiles. Addresses are ranked mailto-first and
a named person before a generic info@.
One attempt per business, ever. If a site turns out to be JavaScript-rendered and yields nothing, that is recorded as what it is rather than as “no email found”, because those are different facts and only one of them is worth retrying later.
If you type in an address yourself, nothing overwrites it.
What is free and where the wall is
The whole list is generated for a free account. Not a teaser built from a partial search — the real thing, scored and ranked.
Your first ten leads are fully workable: name, phone, website, grade, reasoning. The rest are visible as masked rows with a live count, so you can see that thirty-seven more exist without seeing who they are.
The unlock is not an upgrade button. It is turning on payments — the same step that lets the campaign sell a spot at all. Which is deliberate: the moment you can take an advertiser’s money is the moment the rest of the list becomes worth having.
Where you should overrule it
Now the honest part, because a ranking that claims too much is worse than one that claims too little.
“Has a website” is a weak buying signal and the ranking overweights it. Plenty of businesses with terrible websites — or none — buy community card spots every drop and renew without being asked. If you know one of those in your town, call them first regardless of what the letter says.
The engine does not know who you know. A B-grade lead whose owner coaches your kid’s team is a better first call than any A on the list.
It does not know who is currently spending. A business running a Valpak insert or a local magazine ad has already decided direct mail works, and nothing in Google Places surfaces that. Driving your own routes will.
It cannot qualify. Qualifying an advertiser is more of the job than selling them, and it happens in the conversation, not in the queue.
The list is a starting order for a morning of calls. It is not a verdict, and treating it as one would be a worse mistake than building the list by hand.
What it changes
Not the work. You still make the calls, and twenty conversations a week is still the price of admission.
What it removes is the three hours before the calls, and the specific paralysis of not knowing where to start. That was never a skill. It was an obstacle, and it is the reason a great many first cards never got sold.
