The Targeting Premium: Why Lead Gen Tools Are Commodity Infrastructure and Qualification Is the Margin

Lead generation tools have collapsed to commodity infrastructure: contact databases, enrichment, and list export are now table stakes that any agency can resell at software margins. The durable agency margin sits in two places the tools cannot automate, the targeting hypothesis (who specifically, with what trigger, at what moment) and the qualification scoring on the back end. Agencies that own those two layers get paid like partners; those that resell tool access get paid like software resellers.