Leads can deliver value in different ways and its important to remember that all leads have explicitly (a) given us their requirements and (b) explicitly stated that they are in the market in the next 12-months looking for your category of solution. Therefore, if a current client of yours becomes a matched lead, this is an early warning indicator that this client is actively researching and vetting other solutions providers. Therefore, while a different use case for matched leads than attracting a new client, this lead is still valuable in terms of getting early warning of potential churn which can in many ways be just as valuable or more valuable than a new lead since you are already installed. For this reason, matched leads that are existing customers since they are still leads (ie. an active prospect searching for a solution); however, the way you approach this lead should be more subtle and strategic as a result (advice below).

If this happens, we advise actioning your customer success team to escalate their engagement and vigilance over this customer in a subtle way without letting them know that you know they are seeking out alternative solutions. Your goal is to figure out what their issues are, why they are looking for other solutions and solve them quickly before they churn. Subtly and tact are critical in this process. If you express to them that you know they were snooping around and researching other vendors, you (a) risk putting them on the defensive and (b) lose your tactical advantage of knowing without them knowing.

This lead wouldn't meet our refund criteria since first attribution was on HTR (ie. the lead found your product on HTR first so we created the demand/interest for your product).

Refunds are for any demand that we didn't do the work to create
Our refund policy terms in essence function on an attribution basis where any leads you acquired and engaged on your own without HTR's assistance, we certainly don't want you paying for and will always refund. On the other hand any leads where our investment in creating demand and generating leads that you didn't have previously (ie. new demand), we are able to be compensated on a performance basis which keeps us incentivized to keep driving demand to your products through investments in product, content and marketing so that instead of you investing in those things, you rely on HTR to bringing down your acquisition costs and you only pay for performance/results (ie. leads that a) we created the demand for and b) of those, you can select only the ones you are interested in). Here is an example of a lead refund that wasn't eligible because first attribution for this lead is actually on HTR where they first discovered this company via our recommendations quiz:

In this example, there was a slight delay before it hit the vendor's dashboard which is why the hotelier went to the vendor's website
We want to make sure all leads are verified and qualified so since this lead was flagged for an invalid hotel email domain, it didn't get sent to the vendor's dashboard right away because it was being manually investigated and qualified to save the vendor time doing so and to ensure that it was a high quality lead since it was not a valid hotel email. Obviously for HTR, we wouldn't be incentivized to invest in the manual verification processes if they put us at risk of the lead going to the vendor's website directly because of the delay (this is the crux of why the refund policy is based on first attribution).

In this real example, you can see here the final stage of this particular lead's verification investigation, below is the final verification so you can the work we do to make sure all leads we generate for you are verified and vetted before you ever see them in your dashboard and in this case we gathered employment information, project information as well as physical proof of their business card).

As noted in the refund eligibility criteria above, in order to be eligible for the money-back guarantee vendors must meet one of the below criteria:

This policy is designed to ensure the best possible marketplace experience for hoteliers by incentivizing vendors to provide timely follow-up which in turn improves success rates for those vendors.