The math
You're paying twice: once for the lead, once for the silence.
A never-called paid lead costs its purchase price AND its job value. Here's the arithmetic, with every assumption in the open.
Four numbers, multiplied
| Factor | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Purchased leads per week | Your answer — midpoint of the range you pick |
| × estimated miss rate | Conservative lookup keyed to your Coverage Score — slow alerts, dark hours, and one-attempt calling push it up |
| × close rate for your vertical | Set LOW deliberately (10–25%) — shared leads are races even when handled well, so the estimate understates rather than inflates |
| × value of one won job | Your answer |
A home-services shop buying 28 leads a week, scoring in the "Leaking" band (30% estimated miss), a 20% close rate and a $2,500 average job: 28 × 4.3 × 30% × 20% × $2,500 ≈ $18,000 a month in races entered late or never — on top of the vendor invoice you're already paying for those exact leads.
Estimates from your own answers using stated assumptions — labeled that way in every report. The measured discovery replaces the estimate with timestamps, and splits the waste between vendor-side and response-side.
The corrupted-data cost
Unmeasured response time also poisons every lead-buying decision you make: vendors get judged on closes that died in your queue, "good sources" are really just sources whose leads happened to arrive during staffed hours, and budget moves on verdicts the data can't support. Speed-to-lead is the denominator under your whole acquisition spreadsheet — until it's measured, the spreadsheet lies.
Run it with your numbers
Three minutes. Every assumption labeled, every input yours.
Score your lead handling