Why your cheapest lead source is usually your most expensive

A shared lead at £12 and an exclusive lead at £45 look like an easy comparison. They are not comparable at all, because the price on the invoice is not the price you pay.

The cost nobody invoices you for

Every lead consumes sales time whether or not it converts. Someone rings it, rings it again, leaves a message, updates the CRM, and eventually writes it off. That time has a cost, and on cheap leads it is usually larger than the lead price.

Put a figure on it. If a salesperson costs £18 an hour fully loaded and spends an average of twelve minutes across all attempts on a lead, that lead carries £3.60 of labour before anything else happens.

So far the exclusive lead still looks worse. The comparison only resolves when you divide by jobs.

Divide by jobs, not by leads

Assume the shared lead converts at 1.5% and the exclusive at 6%. Those figures are illustrative, but the direction is not mysterious: with an exclusive lead you are the only company calling.

£474 difference per job in this example, in favour of the dearer lead

The cheaper lead is more expensive per job, and it also consumed four times as much of your sales team's week to get there. That second cost is the one that caps growth, because you cannot buy more hours as easily as you can buy more leads.

The cost that does not appear anywhere

There is a third cost, harder to quantify and easy to underestimate. A salesperson who spends most of the day being told 'we've already had three of you ring' stops calling with any conviction, and the good leads in the same list suffer for it.

How to check your own numbers

• Log attempts per lead, by source, for one month
• Put a loaded hourly cost against your sales time
• Calculate total cost per lead including that labour
• Divide by jobs won, by source
• Compare cost per job — not cost per lead

If the cheap source still wins on cost per job, keep buying it. Plenty of buyers run both. The point is not that exclusive is always right; it is that the invoice price cannot tell you which is.