What can leads cost? Work backwards from the order contribution

A lead price only becomes meaningful when you know what a won order leaves for your business. An inexpensive enquiry can become costly if your team spends a long time handling it and few suitable orders follow. A higher purchase price may be affordable when the contribution from an order and your own sales effort fit together. Before your first purchase, work backwards from the result you want.

Start with the order, preserve the contribution your business needs and derive the amount available for acquiring that customer. Only then turn it into a ceiling per purchased enquiry. Every figure below is hypothetical. These are neither webRichtung prices nor typical industry conversion rates, and they are not a forecast for your company. They illustrate a transparent decision about a bounded first purchase.

Establish the contribution from a realistic order

Choose an order your business actually wants and can deliver with its services. An unusually large exceptional project is a poor basis for routine enquiry purchasing. Describe the scope, expected revenue and delivery costs. Use a consistent calculation basis throughout so that differently treated taxes or costs already included elsewhere do not distort the comparison.

Contribution margin is revenue minus variable costs and helps cover fixed costs. The German federal government’s business start-up portal explains this definition. For our bounded purchase trial, we first consider the contribution before customer acquisition costs, which are recorded separately below. This boundary prevents lead purchasing or sales time from being deducted twice.

In the example, a specialist service earns 6,000 euros in revenue. Its assumed variable delivery costs are 3,600 euros, such as materials and services obtained specifically for that order. This leaves 2,400 euros before the separately calculated acquisition effort. Which costs are variable in your business depends on how it operates. Treating every hour of labour as variable without checking would not provide a reliable shortcut.

Our chosen planning rule preserves 1,400 euros of that contribution for the business’s other costs and result. That leaves a maximum of 1,000 euros per won order for all allocated customer acquisition effort. The 1,400 euros is a deliberate reserve in this example. It is neither a universal minimum nor an amount that can already be called profit.

Choose the relevant industry in webRichtung’s lead offering and create your account. The industry page lets you check which customer needs and enquiry details fit the service from which your business expects to earn that contribution.

Keep contact, quotation and order rates separate

Working backwards requires an order conversion rate based on all purchased enquiries. A conversion rate based only on quotations answers a different question. If someone says “one case in four becomes a customer”, establish whether a case means a delivered lead, a substantive conversation or a completed quotation. Without that denominator, the claim cannot support a purchasing budget.

A hypothetical group of 100 enquiries makes the distinction clear. Your team has a substantive conversation with 60 people. Thirty of those contacts receive a quotation, and ten become orders. The contact rate is 60 out of 100, or 60 percent. The quotation rate among reached contacts is 30 out of 60, or 50 percent. Ten of the 30 quotations are accepted, approximately 33.3 percent.

Across all purchased enquiries, however, the order conversion rate is ten out of 100, or ten percent. Multiplying the stages using unrounded values gives the same answer: 0.6 times 0.5 times one third equals 0.1. This overall rate determines the purchase ceiling because you bought enquiries for the whole group, including cases that did not become successful quotations.

Define each status as well. An unsuccessful contact attempt does not count as a substantive conversation. General information is not automatically an individual quotation. A positive discussion is not yet an order. Apply an unambiguous completion criterion for your business and identify decisions that remain open. You can then review the calculation without interpreting similar conversation notes differently.

Calculate sales time for the entire enquiry group

The enquiry price is only part of the effort. Your team reads the request, attempts contact, advises, checks suitability, prepares a quotation where appropriate and follows up agreed next steps. Enquiries without a sale also consume time. Counting only work on successful customers makes the sales process look cheaper than it was for the group being measured.

For this example, assume an average of 30 minutes of active sales work per purchased enquiry. This means total effort for the group divided by all its enquiries. Each individual case does not take exactly half an hour. A short conversation with no further work can sit alongside an extensive quotation. At an illustrative internal rate of 40 euros per hour, the allocated sales effort is 20 euros per enquiry.

That rate values the capacity used. It does not necessarily represent an additional cash payment for every enquiry. Consider actual cash needs separately when planning liquidity. For the economic decision, however, existing staff time should not be treated as unlimited and free. It may otherwise be unavailable for existing customers, preparing delivery or other work the same team must complete.

Check whether visits, extra estimating and other sales expenses are already included in those 20 euros. If they are not, add them once in the appropriate place. The following calculation assumes that 20 euros covers all sales effort included here and that no further acquisition items arise. Replace that assumption explicitly if your own process requires additional work or spending.

Derive the purchase ceiling using three conversion rates

The available 1,000 euros per won order must cover both the enquiry price and the allocated sales effort. Multiply 1,000 euros by the conversion rate measured across all enquiries. This gives the permitted total effort per enquiry. Subtract the 20 euros of sales effort. What remains is the mathematical ceiling for the purchase price.

At a five percent conversion rate, 50 euros per enquiry is available for acquisition: 1,000 times 0.05. After subtracting 20 euros of sales effort, the maximum lead price is 30 euros. At ten percent, the initial allowance is 100 euros, leaving 80 euros. At 15 percent, it is 150 euros, leaving 130 euros. None of these rates is presented as an expected result.

Order conversion	Price ceiling
5 percent	30 euros
10 percent	80 euros
15 percent	130 euros

Check the middle scenario using a complete group. One hundred enquiries at 80 euros each cost 8,000 euros. The assumed 50 sales hours add a calculated 2,000 euros. Total acquisition effort is 10,000 euros. With ten won orders, that is exactly 1,000 euros per order. The planned 1,400 euros is therefore preserved from the original 2,400-euro contribution.

The outer scenarios work the same way. With five orders and a 30-euro enquiry price, purchasing costs 3,000 euros and sales effort 2,000 euros, for a total of 5,000 euros. With 15 orders and a 130-euro price, the figures are 13,000 plus 2,000, totalling 15,000 euros. Both produce 1,000 euros of allocated acquisition effort per won order. The underlying reasoning can therefore be checked independently of the table.

Treat the ceiling as a decision tool rather than a requested price

Your calculated ceiling says nothing about the price at which an enquiry is actually offered. It describes what your model can support under the chosen conditions. According to webRichtung’s lead offering, the valid price is shown before you commission delivery. Compare that actual price with your calculation rather than treating an illustrative amount as an available offer.

For a further check, assume another hypothetical price of 60 euros. Adding 20 euros of sales effort gives 80 euros per enquiry. To stay within 1,000 euros per won order, the required conversion rate is at least eight percent: 80 divided by 1,000. At five percent, acquisition effort would be 1,600 euros per order, exceeding your planning limit.

That finding leads to a concrete choice. You can design a trial with deliberately bounded downside, review the service scope and its contribution, or first measure your sales effort more accurately. Making an excessive purchase amount fit by assuming a more optimistic conversion rate adds no evidence. It merely hides the unresolved question behind a more attractive assumption.

Change conditions individually and transparently. A larger order may produce more contribution but also need more quotation time. A wider service area may create opportunities while adding travel effort. Exclusive delivery means the enquiry is supplied to one provider; it does not oblige the prospect to buy. None of these changes automatically justifies a higher conversion rate in your plan.

Bound the first purchase by money and available time

Set a starting budget that allows your team to handle the group and wait for its results. In the example, an internal allowance of 2,400 euros covers purchasing and valued sales time. At the hypothetical total effort of 80 euros per enquiry, it supports 30 enquiries. This is a calculated quantity, not a claimed available order size or delivery promise.

The team can, however, provide only twelve active sales hours for the trial. At an assumed 30 minutes per enquiry, capacity is sufficient for 24 enquiries. The smaller limit of 24 would therefore govern a bounded start. Purchasing them costs 1,440 euros in the example, while valued sales time is 480 euros. Total effort is 1,920 euros, leaving 480 euros of the internal allowance unused.

You do not need to spend the remaining 480 euros immediately on additional enquiries. If the first conversations require more work than expected, retaining some planning capacity may be useful. Also examine separately when cash payments occur and when money from won orders will arrive. An economically supportable contribution does not ensure that the necessary funds are available today.

For the 24-enquiry group, an assumed ten percent conversion rate produces a model expectation of 2.4 orders. That is an expected value, not an observable number of orders. Two actual wins would mean 960 euros of acquisition effort per order; three would mean 640 euros. With no wins, no finite cost per won order can be calculated, but all the incurred effort remains visible.

Align the monthly limit and evaluation with the same work

webRichtung describes a limit for normal deliveries per calendar month and an area selection within Germany. The monthly limit is a maximum, not a promise that the exact quantity will arrive. Suitable enquiries can be delivered after industry approval when sufficient credit is available. These conditions appear on the lead overview and belong in your purchasing plan, including when your team works in another language.

Your internal starting budget and the delivery limit serve different purposes. The budget bounds the economic effort you allocate; the delivery limit bounds the normal quantity within a calendar month. Your sales team must connect both with unfinished cases. If advice from the previous month is still in progress, less capacity remains for new enquiries even though the calendar has moved on.

Evaluate enquiries from one clearly defined purchase group together. Do not compare arbitrary current wins with only the leads purchased this month if those customers came from different groups. Keep receipt, conversation, quotation, order and open decision connected in an understandable record. This is your own working record; the article does not claim an automatically supplied reporting system for the calculation.

After the trial, replace assumptions with observations. Higher sales time reduces the purchase price your model can support. A lower actual order contribution also reduces the available acquisition allowance. One unusually good order does not remove those relationships. Increase the next step only when you can explain which results and which work stand behind the figures already collected.

Take a concrete purchasing allowance to the industry page

A useful first step does not require a supposedly universal price per lead. It requires a realistic order, a clear cost limit and enough time for the conversations. Working backwards shows which combination of contribution, conversion and handling effort your business wants to support. You can then assess an actual offer against your own economic basis.

Before registering, record the service scope, available acquisition effort per order and your three conversion scenarios. Add the entire sales effort and the smaller of the money and time limits. You now have a practical basis that can be corrected using the first real results. The example figures do not replace any of your own business information.

Open the lead overview, choose your industry and create your account. The industry page shows the enquiry context. The existing registration process and welcome email lead you to the settings for your lead order. Review the service area in Germany, delivery type, monthly maximum and current price against the purchasing allowance you prepared.