Cost per qualified lead
Cost per qualified lead is everything you spent on finding customers divided by the number of people who turned out to be worth talking to. It is the number that tells you whether outreach paid for itself.
Also called CPQL, cost per qualified lead, cost per SQL.
Add everything you spent trying to find customers over a period: software, data, sending costs and the hours if you are being honest about your own time. Divide that by the number of people who came out of it worth a real conversation. That is cost per qualified lead, and it is the figure that decides whether a channel keeps running.
The difficulty is entirely in the word qualified, and it is why published figures are almost never comparable between two companies. One counts anybody who replied. Another counts anybody who replied without saying no. A third counts only people who took a call, and a fourth only those who reached a proposal. Those four definitions can differ by a factor of ten on identical activity, so a cost per qualified lead quoted without its definition is a number wearing a suit.
The second difficulty is what goes in the numerator. Tool subscriptions are easy and everybody includes them. Data and enrichment credits are usually included. The founder's own hours almost never are, which is the single largest reason the figure looks better for do-it-yourself outreach than it is: four hours a week researching prospects is not free, it is the most expensive input in the whole calculation and the one nobody invoices for.
The number is also useless early. Twenty emails and one reply is a cost per lead of whatever you spent, and it tells you nothing, because one reply is one person rather than a rate. It becomes meaningful somewhere in the hundreds of sends, which is the same reason serious benchmarks carry a sample size and the unserious ones do not.
In practice
- €49 of software and 300 emails producing 4 people worth talking to, for about €12 each before counting your own time
- The same 300 emails costing four hours a week of founder research, which at any sensible valuation dwarfs the subscription
- A figure quoted by a vendor that counts every reply as qualified, including the ones that said no
Questions
What counts as qualified?
Whatever you decide, write it down and keep it. The most defensible line for a small company is somebody who replied, is a plausible fit, and has not said no. You can check that from the thread instead of relying on an opinion about intent. What matters far more than where you draw the line is that you stop moving it, since a definition that drifts makes every month incomparable with the last.
Should I include my own time?
Yes, and it is usually the largest input. Outreach done by hand looks cheap because the hours are not invoiced, and that is exactly what makes the comparison between doing it yourself and paying somebody misleading. Put an honest hourly figure on your own time and the arithmetic often reverses.
What is a good number?
There is no cross-industry answer worth repeating, because it moves with contract value more than with anything about the outreach. A hundred euros a lead is excellent if a customer is worth twenty thousand and ruinous if they are worth two hundred. The only comparison that means anything is against your own previous months, on an unchanged definition.
Why do published benchmarks vary so much?
Because qualified is undefined, the numerator rarely includes labour, and most figures are published by somebody with an interest in how they look. When you see one, ask the sample size and the definition first: a rate without either is not evidence, it is decoration.
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