Acquisition Streams and Feeder Streams
One goes looking. The other gives good people a second hearing.
What It Is
Every stream is one of two types, chosen when you create it and fixed thereafter.
An acquisition stream is the normal kind. It searches on a schedule, pays to reveal contact details, and qualifies what it finds.
A feeder stream never searches and never spends anything looking for leads. It has no criteria and no schedule. Leads arrive in one way only: you move them in from another stream's quarantine queue. Each one is then re-scored against the feeder's own objective.
Why It Matters
A good acquisition stream is narrow. You describe a specific person at a specific kind of company, and the tight objective is what makes the qualification pass decisive rather than vague.
But a narrow stream turns down people who are genuinely worth talking to — they simply are not this campaign's target. Judged against the mortgage renewal campaign they score 40; judged against your business as a whole they might score 80.
Without somewhere to put them, your only options are to force them into a campaign whose premise does not apply to them, or to throw away a qualified contact. A feeder is the third option: a broader standard, applied deliberately, before you decide.
The two stream types
| Aspect | Acquisition stream | Feeder stream |
|---|---|---|
| How leads arrive | It searches for them on a schedule | You move them in from another stream's quarantine |
| Search criteria | Required — industry, titles, seniority and the rest | None. The screen does not ask for any |
| Schedule | Days, hours, timezone, start date, end condition | None. There is nothing to schedule |
| Data quality tier | Basic, Standard or Premium | Not applicable — it buys no data |
| Cost of acquiring | Reveal, enrichment and tier charges per lead | Nothing. It never buys a lead |
| Cost of qualifying | One qualification fee per lead | One qualification fee per lead moved in |
| Targeting objective | Narrow and specific | Broad — your business in general |
| What quarantine means there | Wrong for this campaign — try elsewhere | Wrong for your business — time to discard |
How It Works
Because a feeder has no search and no schedule, several figures that matter for an acquisition stream are meaningless for it, and the screens say so rather than showing a misleading zero.
A feeder displays Leads Received instead of Leads Acquired, and reports cost per lead received. Its Leads/Day and quality tier show as dashes in the stream list, and it carries a feeder badge with the note Receives moved leads. Its last run is never stamped, because only the acquisition job stamps one.
The stream list also distinguishes what a stream bought from what it currently holds. An acquisition stream keeps credit for every lead it acquired even after you move some away, with a smaller line underneath reading N here now. This is deliberate: charging a stream for leads it paid for while counting only the ones that stayed would make its cost per lead look far worse than it was.
Examples
You run three narrow streams and one feeder called "General B2B".
Each narrow stream targets one campaign with a tight objective and a high threshold. Anything good but off-target gets moved into the feeder, which is scored against a broad description of your business. The narrow streams stay sharp, and nobody worth talking to is thrown away for being off-message.
A lead is quarantined by the feeder as well.
It has now been turned down by a targeted stream and by the catch-all. The stream screen says as much — there is no better-fitting stream left to try, and discarding is the honest next step. In a feeder, Discard becomes the primary action in the review drawer for exactly this reason.
You have only one stream and a lead you do not want to lose.
The review drawer offers Move to a new Stream rather than a picker, because there is nowhere to move it yet. A stream producing plenty of leads where many are quarantined is a strong signal the audience is slightly off and deserves its own stream tuned to fit.
Warning: The stream type cannot be changed after the stream is created. A feeder has no criteria or schedule to fill in, so there is nothing to convert. If you need the other kind, create a new stream.
