A 10-second hang-up is not a lead — keep junk out of your "it's already ringing" proof

What you're doing and why

The strongest pitch to a potential renter is "your phone already rang" — a real lead captured before anyone is paying you. The platform banks vacant-site leads automatically and flips the site to Pitching so you can start selling. But if every hang-up and robocall counts as "proof", your pipeline lies to you: sites look sellable when they've never had a real customer. This lesson is about putting a quality bar on what counts as proof.

The exact steps

1. When a site flips to Pitching, check WHY before you start outreach: open the site's activity feed and find the flip event — it tells you the trigger ("best rank 73, 1 proof-bank leads").
2. If the trigger was a lead, look at the call: duration, whether a name or job was captured. Anything shorter than the AI greeting (~15s) means the caller never even heard the pitch.
3. If it's junk, tell your agent: "unmark that lead from the proof bank and return the site to ranking_wait." Both are single database updates, and an event records the correction.
4. The platform rule (already shipped — you don't run this by hand): a vacant-site lead only banks if it's a completed form, or a phone call of 60+ seconds where the caller left details.

What it looked like for us

Ozark flipped to Pitching on 2026-07-28 off a 10-second, $0.01 call with no name — the caller hung up before the disclosure greeting finished. Best rank: 73. The site looked ready to sell and wasn't. We unmarked the lead, returned the site to Ranking, and shipped the quality bar with 7 unit tests so the next 10-second hang-up just gets stored quietly with a lead.unqualified event instead of flipping the site.

Gotchas

• An OR rule amplifies junk. "Top-3 rank OR first lead" is the right doctrine, but the lead side needs a quality floor or it fires on noise the rank side never would.
• The lead arrives before the evidence does. The receptionist's save_lead tool fires mid-call, before the transcript and duration exist. Don't judge the lead on the first pass — vacant-site leads stay "new", so the end-of-call report re-evaluates with full data.
• Correct the record, don't just fix the code. The new bar only stops FUTURE junk. The lead that already flipped the site had to be unmarked by hand, with an audit event explaining why.