Solar lead cost per won job: calculate your buying budget

A new solar installation can do more for your business than add revenue. It can fill available installation capacity, give your team a suitable project and begin a valuable customer relationship. To make buying solar leads support those outcomes, you need a practical calculation: what remains from a won job after paying for the enquiry and advising the prospective customer?

An economically sensible lead price depends on your contribution per job, your sales costs and the number of jobs actually won. Looking at the price of a single enquiry cannot answer that question. What matters is the total effort required to turn a group of enquiries into solar projects that your company wants and is equipped to deliver.

This article works through a complete example that you can adapt using your own figures. Every amount and conversion assumption is hypothetical. None represents a webRichtung price, a normal industry result or a promise about your sales performance. The purpose is to build a manageable starting budget and understand which results would make that budget worthwhile.

Start with the contribution from your own solar jobs

Your most useful starting figure comes from your job costing. How much would an additional installation contribute towards running your business and generating profit? The invoice total is insufficient. Materials, installation labour, subcontracted services where applicable and other directly attributable delivery costs must first be deducted.

Choose a job that reflects your normal work. A highly complex exception is no better as a starting point than an unusually easy installation. If you sell different types of solar systems, you can later compare separate calculations. A project with battery storage may have a different cost structure from a smaller system without storage. Your company’s figures should determine the calculation.

In our example, €3,000 remains per won job after its directly attributable delivery costs. We call this the contribution before acquisition. It still needs to cover the acquisition costs considered here and your intended contribution to general overheads and profit. That €3,000 is therefore not automatically profit, nor is it the amount you can freely spend on buying the next enquiry.

Check whether the costing includes additional work outside installation. A project requiring extensive preparation may incur planning costs that belong in the relevant delivery cost category. The allocation must be understandable. Do not deduct the same working time once as project delivery and then again as sales effort. Consistent boundaries are more useful than apparent precision built on overlapping cost categories.

Track the journey from enquiry to confirmed job

A lead opens contact with a prospective customer. Your company then adds its own work: the conversation, assessment of the project, preparation of a suitable quotation and agreement on the work to be carried out. Keep those stages distinct when evaluating your acquisition spending.

For each enquiry, record whether you held a conversation, prepared a quotation and won the job. Include open cases where the customer has not yet decided. This makes the current position clear without treating initial interest as revenue. It also shows which enquiries still require a next action from your team.

That distinction has immediate operational value. A collection of outstanding quotations presents a different task from a collection of people you have not yet reached. The first group may need a helpful follow-up about the proposed system. The second needs organised contact attempts before any quotation can be discussed. Identical lead counts can therefore create very different workloads.

Follow a defined group of enquiries for a sufficiently long period. If you receive twenty leads today and calculate a conversion rate tomorrow, many decisions may remain open. A useful business assessment links each won job to the enquiry that produced it. Mixing new enquiries with unrelated older wins can make the calculation look better or worse without reflecting what actually happened.

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Include the time spent by your sales team

The purchase price is an obvious cost. Processing time is easier to overlook, particularly when the business owner handles consultations personally. A conversation still uses working time even when it produces no separate supplier invoice. Treating the owner’s time as free can hide a process that will be difficult to expand.

Include the work attributable to winning the jobs under review: contact attempts, initial discussions, necessary site visits, quotation preparation and follow-up questions. You do not need to track every minute across the entire business at the outset. A clear record for your initial group of enquiries can already reveal whether your estimate was realistic.

Value that time using an internal cost rate appropriate to your company. Do not automatically apply the selling price of an installation hour when estimating the cost of office staff. Understand the basis you have chosen and use the same method in later comparisons. Otherwise a change in your accounting method could be mistaken for better sales performance.

Remember directly related expenses such as travel to a site visit. Where the journey is already included in the job costing, do not deduct it again here. A clean distinction between acquisition and delivery matters more than an amount displayed to two decimal places. Your calculation should explain how the money and working time were used.

A complete calculation for twenty solar enquiries

Suppose your company buys twenty enquiries for a limited initial period. We use an entirely hypothetical price of €100 per enquiry. The leads therefore cost €2,000 in total. Processing that exact group creates a further €900 in attributable sales costs, including the categories your company has chosen to include.

Once the relevant decision period has ended, two jobs have been won from those enquiries. Both fit the assumed costing, with €3,000 contribution before acquisition per job. We do not add outstanding quotations to the number of won jobs. They remain separate until their outcome is known.

The calculation begins with twenty multiplied by €100, giving €2,000 in lead costs. Adding €900 for sales produces total acquisition spending of €2,900. Dividing that amount by the two won jobs gives €1,450 in acquisition costs per job. The two jobs together contribute €6,000 before acquisition. Subtracting €2,900 leaves €3,100 for the intended contribution to overheads and profit.

The enquiry itself costs €100 in this example, but acquiring a job costs €1,450 once the associated sales work is included. That difference is what makes the calculation useful for a purchasing decision. It connects spending on opportunities with the contribution from work actually won, instead of comparing isolated contact prices.

You can run exactly the same calculation with your own figures. If the two jobs differ in size, add their actual contributions rather than forcing both into an artificial average. Once the initial period is complete, replace estimated sales time with the effort your team recorded. Keep the original estimate so you can understand which assumptions changed.

See how the number of wins changes the outcome

A useful calculation also shows what happens under different results. Holding lead costs and sales costs constant in this example produces different contributions depending on the number of won jobs. We deliberately keep those costs unchanged to isolate the effect of conversion. In your company, processing effort may also change with the outcome.

Jobs won	After acquisition
0	−€2,900
1	€100
2	€3,100
3	€6,100

One job just covers the acquisition costs recorded in this example. However, the remaining €100 is unlikely to match your intended contribution to general overheads and profit. A positive number alone therefore does not tell you whether buying the enquiries meets your commercial objectives. You need a target for what should remain.

Set that target before starting. Doing so prevents you from interpreting any eventual conversion count as a success. It also highlights the value of a well-run consultation: converting another genuinely suitable project into a job changes the economics of the whole group. This is a reason to organise useful advice and follow-up, rather than assuming that buying more enquiries alone will improve the result.

Work backwards to a lead price ceiling

You can reverse the calculation. Instead of starting with a quoted lead price, decide how much contribution the won jobs should retain after acquisition. That gives you a calculated purchasing ceiling. It depends on your assumptions and does not mean you should automatically spend up to that amount.

Keep the example of two jobs contributing €3,000 each before acquisition. You want at least €2,000 to remain after acquisition costs, and you still expect €900 in sales effort. This leaves a maximum of €3,100 for buying twenty enquiries: €6,000 contribution less the desired €2,000 and the €900 sales cost.

Dividing €3,100 by twenty gives €155 per enquiry as the calculated ceiling for this particular scenario. A different expected number of wins or a different actual workload changes the ceiling. The calculation supports a reasoned starting expectation; it does not replace learning from your own sales activity or turn uncertain outcomes into guaranteed ones.

If you have no experience buying solar enquiries, examine several scenarios. Choose an initial volume whose costs you could also carry if results were weaker. A limited start should provide new customer conversations and your own decision data without making the company’s financial plan depend on a single conversion assumption.

Match purchasing to consultation and installation capacity

An attractive job contributes most when your business can advise the customer and carry out the work reliably. Before starting, check two separate capacities: who will handle new enquiries, and when could your installation team take on the resulting projects? Both need to support the same plan.

Empty installation slots are insufficient if nobody can make time for consultations. Equally, a busy sales week creates little additional value if you cannot offer suitable prospects a realistic next step. Plan conversation windows, quotation preparation and responsibility for follow-up together. Capacity should describe the work your team can actually undertake.

Your service area also affects the calculation. An enquiry outside your usual radius may require more travel and coordination. That is not automatically a problem, but it should suit your costing and business direction. A company seeking regional growth can start with the German area where consultation and installation are already well organised.

Decide who records outcomes. A short shared overview may be sufficient: new contact, conversation completed, quotation in preparation, quotation sent, job won or case closed. The important point is that everyone understands the same position and every open prospect has a visible next step. This also makes the eventual cost calculation easier to reconstruct.

Compare delivery options using your own sales results

webRichtung offers solar enquiries regionally within Germany or nationwide in Germany. You choose a delivery option and a monthly ceiling for your lead order. With exclusive delivery, webRichtung passes the enquiry only to your business. With standard delivery, no more than three providers receive it. Current prices are shown before you place the order, as explained on the solar lead service page.

Compare the available options using the same cost categories. Enter the actual enquiry price for each option and track contact effort, quotations and wins separately. Do not assume that either option always produces a fixed conversion rate. Your offer, personal advice and the prospective customer’s needs remain part of the outcome.

Exclusive delivery describes how webRichtung distributes the enquiry. It does not oblige the prospective customer to buy from your company. The benefit lies in the selected delivery arrangement; winning the work still depends on your own service and a suitable offer. Likewise, a monthly ceiling limits delivery and is not a promised volume of enquiries.

Start with a manageable solar lead order

Before starting, record your assumptions on one page: contribution per job, expected sales effort, desired remaining contribution, manageable volume and service area. Agree who will contact new prospects and how the first conversation should lead to a concrete consultation step. This gives your purchasing decision an operational foundation.

Register your business on the solar industry page. Your welcome email takes you to webRichtung Customer, where you can configure the area in Germany, delivery option and monthly ceiling and see the current price before ordering. webRichtung handles enquiry acquisition; your business brings its expertise in consultation, design and installation.

Review the initial group when the enquiries have reached a meaningfully assessable stage. Compare the original assumptions with actual effort and won jobs. Use the result to decide the next volume you can manage and identify where your sales process already works well. A question about price then becomes a practical decision about acquiring new solar customers.

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