THE SHORT ANSWER
Judge return on margin, not revenue. A realistic band across Western European home-improvement trades is 15 to 40 units of revenue and 3 to 9 units of gross margin for every unit spent on exclusive leads. Solar and heat pumps sit at the high end because job values are large; painting and flooring sit at the low end. Anything reported above 12 times margin is normally a small sample, an unattributed referral, or a lead cost that quietly excludes sales labour.
The honest answer to what return you should expect is a band, not a number, and the band is wide because it is driven mostly by job value, which is fixed by your trade rather than by your skill. A landscaper and a heat pump installer running identical processes on identically priced leads will report returns that differ by a factor of four.
What is not fixed by trade is where you land inside your band. That is decided by response speed, qualification discipline and whether you quote in writing within a week. Those three account for most of the variance between two firms buying the same volume in the same city. None of them requires a better supplier; all of them require a decision about how the first hour after an enquiry arrives is spent.
The numbers, at a glance
Revenue per unit of lead spend: 15 to 40 across the trades covered here, with solar and heat pumps at the top
Gross margin per unit of lead spend: 3 to 9, which is the figure that actually pays wages
Worked example: EUR 70 per lead, five leads per sale and a EUR 12,000 job at 24 percent margin returns EUR 2,880 of margin on EUR 350 of spend, or 8.2 times
Time to realise it: 6 to 12 weeks between paying for the lead and invoicing the job, longer for anything requiring planning consent
Why revenue multiples are the wrong headline
A kitchen fitter can quote a 45 times revenue return and be losing money, because a EUR 22,000 kitchen carrying 14 percent margin after cabinetry costs leaves EUR 3,080, and if the leads per sale is eight at EUR 80 each, the acquisition cost is EUR 640 plus perhaps EUR 900 of design and quoting time. The revenue multiple is spectacular and the margin multiple is two.
Insist on the margin version in every conversation, including internal ones. It is the only version that survives a bad quarter, and it is the version a bank or an investor will ask for if you ever need either.
The band, by trade
Heat pumps and solar. Job values of EUR 7,000 to EUR 18,000 and three to five leads per sale put the margin return at 6 to 9 times when the process is tight. These trades also carry the highest lead prices, which is not a coincidence.
Roofing, glazing and insulation. Mid job values and four to seven leads per sale give 4 to 7 times. Roofing swings hardest on urgency: storm-driven enquiries convert far above the average.
Kitchens and bathrooms. Very large invoices but thin percentage margins and long consideration periods produce 3 to 6 times, with the widest spread of any trade on this list.
Painting, flooring and landscaping. Small jobs and five to nine leads per sale give 3 to 5 times. These trades depend on repeat and referral work to make the arithmetic comfortable.
The three levers that decide where you sit in your band
Response time is first and it is not close. Calling within five minutes rather than within a day roughly doubles the contact rate on the same enquiries, and contact rate multiplies through every downstream number. A firm at 55 percent contact and a firm at 85 percent contact are buying two different products at the same price.
Second is written quotation speed. An enquiry quoted within seventy-two hours wins materially more often than the same enquiry quoted after ten days, because the homeowner has stopped comparing by then. Third is disqualification: saying no quickly to work you do not want protects the calendar time that the winnable jobs need.
What a realistic first quarter looks like
Expect the first cohort to underperform the band, typically by 30 to 50 percent, because your intake process has not been built for volume yet. The common failures are predictable: nobody owns first contact, the enquiries arrive by email into an inbox checked twice a day, and quotes queue behind site work.
Plan the first quarter as a process build with revenue attached rather than as a channel test. Judge the channel from the second quarter, once contact rate has stabilised above 75 percent. Businesses that switch supplier after four weeks are almost always re-buying the same problem.
Measure your return so the number means something
Report margin return alongside revenue return, and lead with the margin one.
Attach the loaded cost of surveys and quotations to the lead cost before dividing.
Wait one full sales cycle before calculating anything, then hold the cohort fixed.
Track contact rate weekly as the leading indicator, since it moves months before return does.
Compare your figure against your own previous quarter, not against a number from another trade.
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.
How Flock Leads prices this
Return depends on what you paid, so it helps to model it against fixed per-lead prices rather than a rate that changes with every order.
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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Related answers
Frequently asked questions
Is a 3 times margin return worth doing?
Usually yes, if the crews would otherwise be idle. Three times margin on a filled week beats infinite return on an empty one. It stops being worth doing when it displaces higher-margin work you could have won through referrals in the same slot.
Why is my return lower than these bands?
In order of likelihood: contact rate below 70 percent, quotes issued more than a week after the enquiry, or a sample too small to be meaningful. Check those three before concluding the leads are poor. Each is measurable in an afternoon from records you already hold, and two of them are fixable without spending anything.
Should I include VAT in the revenue figure?
No. Calculate everything excluding VAT, on the revenue side and the cost side alike. Including it inflates the revenue multiple by around a fifth while doing nothing at all to the margin multiple, which is one more reason to lead with margin whenever you report the number to anyone outside the business.
How does return change as I buy more volume?
It declines gently, because the easiest enquiries in a territory are consumed first and because sales capacity gets stretched. Expect a five to fifteen percent fall in margin return when you double monthly volume without adding sales resource. Plan for it rather than treating it as a supplier failure, and add the resource before the volume rather than after.
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