How Kestrel compares

Five questions to ask any AI lead-response tool

Whichever tool you look at, including this one, these five questions sort the options faster than any feature list. Ask them before the demo, not after.

1. Is the price on the website? A published price means you can work out the cost per lead and per closing on your own. Quote-only pricing usually means a sales call first, and often a price set by your team size or lead volume.
2. Is there a contract, a setup fee, or usage billing? Monthly with no setup fee lets you test the tool on real leads and leave if it doesn't pay. An annual term or metered texts and minutes can make the real cost hard to know in advance.
3. Do you have to change anything else to use it? Some assistants only come with a vendor's lead-generation platform or ad program. Others ask you to move your CRM, website and lead flow onto one system. A standalone tool works with the leads and CRM you already have.
4. Does it text, call, or both? Match the tool to how your leads arrive. If most come from portals and website forms, a text reply fits. If most phone in, a voice tool may fit better. Ask which one the tool actually does on day one.
5. What happens when you leave? Ask where the conversations and contact details live, and whether you can take them with you. For Kestrel, the lead conversations live in your Kestrel dashboard, and your CRM and lead sources stay exactly as they were, because nothing was moved off them.

Which kind of tool fits which agent

• A team with an ISA budget and a sales process may be well served by a team-priced platform, where the vendor's onboarding and account management are part of the price.
• An agent already buying a vendor's leads and ads may find the AI bundled with that platform convenient, as long as they plan to stay on it.
• An agent who wants one system for everything, CRM, website and lead generation together, may prefer an all-in-one platform and accept the migration.
• A solo agent who already has leads and a CRM and just needs every new lead answered quickly is who Kestrel is built for: a published price, month-to-month, nothing to migrate.

How to run a fair two-week test

1. Write down your baseline first: your median time to first reply and how many of last month's leads you actually spoke with. The speed-to-lead guide has a 20-minute way to measure it.
2. Send every new lead through the tool for two weeks. Cherry-picking leads makes any tool look better or worse than it is.
3. Count conversations, not features: how many leads replied, how many answered the qualifying questions, and how many turned into a booked showing or a call you wanted to take.
4. Price it per conversation. Divide the monthly cost by the number of real conversations it produced, and compare that with what your current leads cost you.

Kestrel's trial is 14 days with no card, which is long enough to run exactly this test. What Kestrel does in that time: it texts each new lead back in under 60 seconds, asks about budget, timeline and pre-approval, scores the lead HOT, WARM or COLD, alerts you when one is ready, and can book the showing on your Google Calendar. It works by text only; it doesn't answer or return phone calls.