THE SHORT ANSWER
The invoice is the smallest component. A bad lead consumes roughly ten minutes of admin, fifteen minutes of call attempts, ninety minutes on site and forty-five minutes travelling, plus two hours writing a quotation nobody wanted. At loaded rates that is EUR 120 to EUR 250 of real cost, so a EUR 60 lead that reaches the survey stage destroys around EUR 300. This is why paying more for qualification is usually the cheaper option.
Contractors negotiate hard over the difference between EUR 55 and EUR 70 a lead and then absorb a wasted Tuesday afternoon without recording it anywhere. The asymmetry is understandable, because one number arrives as an invoice and the other arrives as a slightly worse mood, but it is the wrong way round financially. The gap between the two is usually a factor of five.
Putting a real figure on a bad lead does two things. It changes what you are willing to pay for tighter qualification, and it changes how aggressively you disqualify on the first phone call, which is the cheapest intervention available anywhere in this process. Both changes cost nothing and both take effect immediately, which is rare in this part of a contracting business.
The numbers, at a glance
Time consumed by a bad lead that reaches site: roughly 4 hours across admin, calls, travel, survey and quotation
Loaded cost of that time: EUR 120 to EUR 250 depending on who attends and how far they travel
Total destruction on a EUR 60 lead: around EUR 300 once the survey has happened, five times the purchase price
Cost of catching it on the phone instead: EUR 8 to EUR 15, which is the entire argument for a scripted first call
The itemised bill for one bad lead
Admin and logging, ten minutes. Someone reads the enquiry, enters it, assigns it. Roughly EUR 6.
Call attempts, fifteen minutes. Three attempts across two days, plus a voicemail and a follow-up message. Roughly EUR 9.
Travel, forty-five minutes. Return journey plus vehicle cost. Roughly EUR 35 to EUR 60.
Survey, ninety minutes. Measuring, photographing, discussing. Roughly EUR 55 to EUR 110 depending on seniority.
Quotation, sixty to a hundred and twenty minutes. Pricing, drafting, sending, one follow-up. Roughly EUR 40 to EUR 90.
The bill runs from EUR 145 to EUR 275 before the purchase price. Add the lead itself and a single bad enquiry that made it all the way to a written quotation has consumed between EUR 200 and EUR 350 of the business.
The cost that is larger and harder to see
Opportunity cost usually exceeds direct cost. The Tuesday afternoon spent surveying a renter who cannot authorise the work is an afternoon not spent on a homeowner who could. If your estimator is the constraint in the business, every wasted survey has a shadow price equal to the expected margin of the job they did not attend.
At a 30 percent win rate and EUR 2,400 of gross margin per job, an estimating slot is worth EUR 720 in expectation. That number is uncomfortable and it is the correct way to think about survey discipline. It also explains why firms with disciplined qualification routinely outperform firms with more leads.
Where in the process bad leads should be caught
Almost every disqualifying fact is discoverable in a four-minute phone call: ownership, whether both decision makers are involved, rough budget expectation, timeline, and whether the property is inside your working radius. None requires a site visit and all of them are routinely discovered on the doorstep instead.
The obstacle is rarely knowledge, it is discomfort. Asking a stranger about budget feels rude, so the question gets deferred to the survey, where it costs a hundred times more to ask. A written call script removes the discomfort by making the question routine rather than a personal choice.
What this means for what you should pay
If tighter qualification reduces your wasted-survey rate from three in ten to one in ten, on forty leads a month that is eight surveys saved, worth EUR 1,200 to EUR 2,000 in direct cost alone. Spread across forty leads, you could pay EUR 30 more per lead for that improvement and still be ahead.
This is the arithmetic that makes the cheapest source in the market the most expensive one. Price per enquiry is a rounding error against the labour it consumes, and the only sensible comparison between suppliers is cost per job won with the survey time included.
Reduce what bad leads cost you
Write a four-minute qualifying script covering ownership, decision makers, budget, timeline and location.
Make the script mandatory before any survey is booked, with no exceptions for busy weeks.
Log the reason every disqualified lead failed, so you can prove patterns to your supplier.
Cost one wasted survey properly, once, and circulate the number to whoever books them.
Renegotiate on qualification criteria rather than on price, since the leverage is far greater.
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.
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Related answers
Frequently asked questions
Should I reject every lead that fails qualification?
Reject the ones that breach the agreed specification and log the rest. A lead that is qualified but simply says no is not a bad lead, and treating it as one destroys your credibility when you report a genuine breach.
How do I get sales staff to disqualify properly?
Remove the incentive to inflate the pipeline. If activity metrics reward surveys booked, staff will book surveys. Reward quotes issued to qualified prospects and win rate, and the behaviour corrects itself within a month. Publish the cost of one wasted survey where the team will see it weekly.
Is it worth paying for pre-qualified appointments instead?
Sometimes. Appointment products cost three to six times a lead and remove the calling burden, not the survey burden. They pay off when your constraint is phone time rather than estimating time, which is less common than vendors suggest. Test one month against your normal volume before committing to a quarter of it.
What proportion of bought leads should be genuinely bad?
Five to fifteen percent of exclusive volume, depending on how tightly the specification is written. Below five percent, the specification is probably so narrow that volume is being suppressed. Above twenty, something upstream is wrong. Track the figure monthly, because a drift from six percent to fifteen is a signal long before anyone starts complaining.
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