Lead distribution: the four shapes a request can reach sellers in
In short
Lead distribution takes 4 shapes: broadcast to everyone eligible, a sequential offer down a ranked list, a shortlist of a few sellers, and exclusive assignment to one. They differ in who absorbs a non-response — the buyer waits, the sellers waste effort, or the platform carries the risk — and asking what happens to a request nobody answers identifies which one you have.
Key takeaways
- The 4 shapes differ by who absorbs silence: broadcast bills the sellers, sequential bills the buyer's patience, exclusive bills the platform.
- Ask what happens to a request nobody answers in 60 seconds. The answer names your shape faster than reading the code.
- Broadcast to 40 sellers to win 4 responses is 36 wasted reads, every time, and that cost compounds across a supply base.
- Most live platforms run the unnamed hybrid: an initial narrow offer that widens on a timer until someone accepts.
- The shape is also the leakage surface. Broadcasting contact details to a dozen sellers is the highest-risk moment on the platform.
A request arrives and has to reach sellers somehow. There are 4 ways to do it: broadcast it to everyone eligible, offer it to one seller at a time down a ranked list, put it in front of a small shortlist, or assign it exclusively to one seller. Every platform implements one of these, or a hybrid of two, and the difference between them is not technical elegance. It is who pays when nobody answers.
That question also identifies which one you have, which is worth knowing precisely, because teams routinely describe their platform as one shape while the code implements another.
Four shapes, and who pays when nobody answers
| Shape | What a seller receives | Buyer wait | Who absorbs a non-response |
|---|---|---|---|
| Broadcast | A notification identical to the one 40 others got | Shortest — someone almost always replies | Sellers, in wasted reads and duplicated effort |
| Sequential offer | An exclusive offer with a countdown | Longest — each decline costs the timeout | The buyer, in waiting |
| Shortlist | An invitation to quote against 2 to 4 rivals | Hours to days, by design | Sellers, in quoting work that mostly loses |
| Exclusive assignment | A job, with an obligation attached | Short, until the one seller declines | The platform, which owns the fallback |
The economics are more asymmetric than they look. A broadcast reaching 40 plumbers to produce 4 responses spends 36 reads per job, and that cost lands on the supply side the platform is usually short of. A sequential offer with a 15-second timeout down a list of 8 can keep a buyer waiting 2 minutes while the screen says "finding you someone".
The identifying question, and the hybrid it exposes
Ask one question of your own system: a request arrives, and for 60 seconds nobody responds. What happens next? If the answer is "nothing, it sits in everyone's list", you have a broadcast. If it is "it moves to the next seller", it is sequential. If it is "the buyer waits for quotes until the window closes", it is a shortlist. If it is "an operations person gets an alert", you have exclusive assignment, whatever the roadmap calls it.
Most answers are none of those, because most live platforms drift into the shape nobody names: an initial narrow offer that widens on a timer. 3 sellers are offered the job, 3 more after 20 seconds, then everyone in range after a minute — a decaying exclusivity, or an expanding shortlist, depending which end you look from.
What each shape teaches sellers to do
- Broadcast teaches speed over fit. The fastest reply wins, so specialists stop bothering with a feed where they lose to whoever had a phone in their hand.
- Sequential teaches acceptance discipline, because declining moves the work on. That makes acceptance behaviour a real signal — with the caveats in acceptance rate as a dispatch input.
- Shortlist teaches quoting quality, and taxes it. Quoting against 3 rivals means 4 quotes per win, so the shortlist stays small or good sellers stop responding.
- Exclusive teaches reliance. Best experience for the seller who receives it, worst incentive for the platform, which must now be right about who to pick.
Shared and exclusive leads are this distinction in a paid-lead market, where one enquiry may be sold to 4 buyers. The mechanics are identical and only the billing differs: a shared lead is the broadcast experience with an invoice attached.
Matching the shape to what the buyer is actually buying
- Buyer wants it done now and any qualified seller will do — a ride, a same-day cleaner: sequential, or a narrow widening offer. Speed is the product and a shortlist wastes it.
- Buyer is choosing between differentiated sellers on price, portfolio or approach — a renovation, a photographer: shortlist. Removing the comparison removes the reason to use the platform.
- Supply is thin and everyone is busy: widen faster and cap how wide it goes. A broadcast in a thin market annoys everyone before the same seller accepts anyway.
- The work carries an obligation the platform underwrote — a contract, a guaranteed slot: assign exclusively and build the fallback path first, because it will be used.
- Whichever you choose, instrument the non-response. Time-to-first-response and offers-per-fill tell you the shape is failing before your sellers do.
Every distribution shape is a decision about whose time is cheap. Sellers work out the answer within a fortnight, and behave accordingly.
Three things the shape does not settle
- Order. Which sellers are eligible and in what sequence is a ranking question, and the layers people collapse when discussing it are separated in signal, score and sort order.
- Concentration. Whether one strong seller should be allowed to take everything is a policy argued in capping how much one seller can win, and every shape can produce concentration for different reasons.
- Leakage. Broadcast hands buyer contact details to a dozen sellers at once, which is the highest-risk moment on any platform for a deal going off-platform — the detection problem in classifier or pattern rules for spotting a shared number.
The shape also decides what the seller app has to be. A broadcast needs a fast, skimmable feed; a sequential offer needs a full-screen countdown that survives a locked phone; a shortlist needs a quoting surface. That is 3 different products, which is why the choice belongs at the start of an MVP or product build rather than after the buyer app is finished. The rest of this silo — ranking, dispatch timing, thin markets and fairness — sits under matching, ranking and dispatch, part of our marketplaces and platforms practice.
Frequently asked questions
Short answers to the follow-ups this page tends to raise.
What is lead distribution in a marketplace?
The rule that decides which sellers see a buyer's request, in what order, and how many at once. It takes 4 shapes — broadcast to everyone eligible, a sequential offer down a ranked list, a shortlist of a few, or exclusive assignment to one — and each one moves the cost of a non-response onto a different party.
What is the difference between a shared lead and an exclusive lead?
A shared lead reaches several sellers at once, an exclusive lead reaches one. Shared leads fill faster and cost each seller wasted effort on the ones they lose; exclusive leads give a better seller experience and put the burden on the platform to pick correctly and to have a fallback when the chosen seller declines.
Is broadcasting a lead to every seller a bad design?
It is the right default only where supply is plentiful and speed is the product. Broadcasting concentrates cost on the supply side — 40 notifications to win 4 responses — and rewards whoever replies fastest rather than whoever fits best, so specialists disengage. In thin markets it fails on its own terms: everyone is annoyed and the same seller accepts anyway.
How do I tell which distribution shape my platform actually uses?
Ask what happens to a request that nobody answers for 60 seconds. Sitting in every seller's list means broadcast; moving to the next seller means sequential; waiting for quotes until a window closes means shortlist; alerting an operations person means exclusive assignment. If the answer is that the offer widens on a timer, you are running the common hybrid and should write its schedule down.
- lead distribution
- dispatch
- marketplace design
- supply side
The work behind this page
Builds from our portfolio that this page draws on.
ShortList
An AI recruiting screener that reads every application, scores candidates against the role, and hands recruiters a ranked shortlist with outreach already drafted.
HR & RecruitingFieldRoute
An AI field-service platform that auto-dispatches the best-matched technician, optimizes routes, and tracks first-time-fix against every SLA.
OperationsRead next
- Dispatch radius: a travel-time boundary that only looks like a circleThe circle on the map is a proxy. The real boundary is however far a provider can travel in an acceptable time, which is different in every direction and at every hour.definition
- Signal, score and sort order: three layers people keep collapsingA signal is a measurement, a score is policy and a sort is a product rule that can ignore both. Most ranking arguments are two people proposing changes at different layers.definition
- Acceptance rate: what it measures, and when it measures the platformAccepted over offered sounds like a measure of a seller. The platform chooses the denominator, so an uncorrected acceptance rate is partly a measure of your own targeting.definition
- A handful of sellers are taking everything: is it the ranker or the market?Concentration is only a defect if your ranker built it. Re-rank the same queries with every history-derived signal removed, and the share distribution tells you which answer you have.diagnostic
- Matching got slower as supply grew: which stage stopped being linearPlot each stage's duration against candidate-set size on log-log axes. The slope names the stage that stopped being linear, and each stage has a structurally different repair.diagnostic
- Availability: a set of intervals, not a grid of day cellsAvailability is not a stored fact. It is the answer to a question, computed from recurring rules, exceptions and what has already been consumed — and a day-cell table is a cache of that answer.definition
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