Most lead-generation spend is wasted on the wrong unit. Agencies bill retainers ($3k–$10k/month whether anything ships), SDR tools bill seats ($75–$150/seat/month plus the human behind it), and data vendors bill credits that mostly resolve to stale contacts. None of those units is the thing you actually want: a qualified person you can sell to.
The pay-per-result model
Pay-per-result flips the unit of account. You define your ideal customer profile — role, industry, company size, geography, exclusions — and you pay a fixed price per contact that passes verification against that definition. At Forward, a verified lead is $10 at standard difficulty. The acceptance criteria are explicit and machine-checked before any charge fires:
- matches every ICP filter in your brief
- email and/or phone verified deliverable — not catch-all, not disposable
- not a duplicate of anything previously delivered
- not on your suppression or existing-customer list
A contact that fails any check is never billed. That single property changes the economics of the whole category: the vendor carries the quality risk instead of you.
What the market charges in 2026
For calibration: contact-data providers charge $1–$10 per enriched contact (no qualification), pay-per-lead services charge $50–$500 per lead depending on vertical, and the loaded cost of a qualified lead from an in-house SDR runs ~$40 once you divide salary and tooling by actual qualified output. Pay-per-result pricing should land between raw data and human-qualified — paying $10 for a contact that is verified against your definition, with the failed ones free, is the rational middle.
Questions to ask any pay-per-result vendor
1) Who defines "qualified" — you or them? (It must be you, in writing, before checkout.) 2) What exactly is verified before billing, and can you see the evidence per lead? 3) Is there a hard budget cap? 4) Are charges itemized per result and reversible if acceptance later fails? 5) Is there an SLA — and what happens if it is missed? Forward's answers: you define it in the brief; every result ships with its verification evidence; caps are enforced on every payment rail; every charge maps to one result_id and auto-reverses on acceptance failure; and if the first verified lead doesn't land within 7 days, the engagement is free.