The question is never whether a channel works. It is whether it works at your job value and your close rate. What follows is buying exclusive leads applied to one trade only, solar panel installers: what it costs per enquiry and per signed job, where the ceiling sits, what it demands of you, and an unhedged answer at the end.

The numbers that govern the decision: projects run EUR 7,000 to EUR 14,000, the buyer is typically a homeowner comparing three quotes for a roof-mounted system, demand peaks spring and early summer and falls away in November to January, and 3 to 5 genuine enquiries are needed for each customer signed.

The numbers, at a glance

• Price per exclusive enquiry: EUR 90 to EUR 150 in the Benelux baseline, rising with the country multiplier and falling with package size

• Modelled cost per signed job: EUR 270 to EUR 750, at 3 to 5 exclusive enquiries per customer

• Time to first enquiry: a week from a standing start

• Verdict for solar panel installers: The quickest way to add volume for solar panel installers, and the only option here whose price you know before you spend anything.

The shape of buying exclusive leads for this trade

Intent on Buying exclusive leads is stated, because the enquiry has already been screened against your criteria before it reaches you. No build phase, no monthly retainer, no learning period, and the cost per enquiry is known before you commit.

The limit that rarely appears in a sales conversation: the capacity to answer a phone within minutes during working hours, which is a harder bar than it sounds. For a solar panel business covering one metro, check that before anything else, because a channel you cannot feed will underperform its own benchmarks indefinitely.

The downside is worth stating plainly. You pay a premium over running the campaign yourself, and you are dependent on a supplier's volume rather than your own. Skill required: Almost none on acquisition. All of it moves to follow-up speed and quoting.

Ask how the enquiries are generated, because it predicts everything else

Enquiries sourced from search behave differently from enquiries sourced from social, which behave differently again from a comparison quiz or an incentivised competition entry. The source determines intent, and intent determines close rate far more than the qualification questions do. A supplier who will not describe their channel mix is usually blending a high-intent source with a much cheaper one.

Speed to first contact is worth more than any price negotiation

Reach rate on a fresh enquiry falls steeply with delay: high within a few minutes, materially lower after half an hour, roughly halved by the next morning. Because the enquiry is already paid for, every unreachable one loads its cost onto the ones you do reach. No supplier discount available anywhere moves the effective cost per usable enquiry as far as fixing the first call does.

Attribution: why your reports and your diary disagree

Every platform and every supplier reports on a basis that favours itself, and the household who found you through three touchpoints will be claimed by all of them. For solar panel work, where the consideration period can run for weeks, the discrepancy is large enough to drive genuinely bad decisions.

The workable discipline is to ask every enquiry one question at intake about how they found you, record it in your own system, and treat platform reporting as a relative signal for comparing one asset against another rather than as a statement of truth.

How a solar enquiry behaves before you ever speak to it

By the time a homeowner submits a solar form they have usually spent six to ten weeks reading, run at least one payback calculator and settled on a rough system size in kilowatt peak. The first call is an audit rather than an education. The installers who win are the ones who can confirm or correct the homeowner's own figures inside two minutes, because those figures are already written down on a kitchen table somewhere. Arriving with a generic benefits pitch signals that you did not read what they sent.

Qualification criteria and rejection rules for bought solar enquiries

Solar has the clearest qualification set of any trade in this list, which is why bought enquiries perform well here when the criteria are specified in advance and badly when they are not. Agree all of it in writing before the first enquiry arrives.

• Require on every enquiry: ownership, roof orientation, approximate roof age, single occupancy or apartment, annual consumption or a recent bill figure, and a decision timeline

• Reject automatically: tenants, apartments with shared roofs, roofs needing replacement before any array can be fitted, and timelines beyond twelve months

• Reject on inspection: households whose stated interest is subsidy availability rather than installation, which is the highest-volume failure mode in this sector

• Negotiate a replacement window: forty-eight hours is standard and long enough to establish ownership and roof condition on a first call

The arithmetic, with one variable already removed

This calculation is shorter than the others in the family, because the first number is fixed in advance rather than discovered after a month of spending.

1. Price per exclusive enquiry: EUR 90 to EUR 150 at the Benelux baseline for solar panel work, adjusted by country and by package size.

2. Enquiries per customer: 3 to 5, and lower than a self-run campaign because the enquiry has already been screened on roof orientation, roof age, ownership, annual consumption and timeline.

3. Cost per signed job: EUR 270 to EUR 750.

4. Against a midpoint project of EUR 10,500, that is 2.6 to 7.1 percent of contract value.

You are paying roughly 20 to 40 percent more than the same enquiry would cost you to generate. That premium buys the removal of four things: the build phase, the learning period, the retainer and the risk of a wasted month. For a solar panel business that needs the diary filled this quarter it is usually a sound purchase, and for one with a mature account and spare management time it usually is not.

What the solar site visit has to establish

Roof pitch and orientation are the obvious items, but the visits that go wrong go wrong at the consumer unit. Available fuse ways, main fuse rating, earthing arrangement and the cable run from array to inverter all change the price, and none of them are visible from a satellite image. A remote quote later revised upward for board work is the fastest way to lose a signed job in this trade. Price the electrical side on site or price it conservatively up front, and say which you have done.

Work through this before committing to buying exclusive leads

1. Write down your own gross margin percentage on a typical solar panel job, not your revenue.

2. Take 10 to 20 percent of the gross margin on a signed job, which is the normal range, and you have your maximum acquisition cost per customer.

3. Divide your maximum acquisition cost per customer by 3 to 5, the enquiries this trade needs to sign one, and you have the most you can pay for a single enquiry.

4. Make sure there is a page about solar panel alone before you send anyone to it. A homepage covering everything roughly halves what follows.

How these figures were built

These figures are a benchmark model, not a survey. They combine an industry base range observed across Western European home-improvement campaigns with a country multiplier for local auction pressure. Treat them as a band to negotiate against, not a quote. The channel assumptions behind this page are separate: click prices and conversion rates come from home-improvement campaign performance across Western Europe, and they move with the auction rather than with the trade.

How Flock Leads prices this

Set against the model above, this is the outright price of exclusive solar panel enquiries, with no retainer and no contract term:

• Starter - 10 leads for EUR 750, which is EUR 75 per lead

• Growth - 25 leads for EUR 1,750, which is EUR 70 per lead

• Scale - 45 leads for EUR 2,925, which is EUR 65 per lead

• Pro - 70 leads for EUR 4,340, which is EUR 62 per lead

• Max - 90 leads for EUR 5,400, which is EUR 60 per lead

No retainer, no contract term, and no lead sent to a second business. Unused volume rolls over under the Flock Lead Promise.

Want leads like this in your pipeline?

Flock runs the campaigns, screens the enquiries and hands you only the ones that match your service area, job size and capacity. You pay per lead, not per month.

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