Decision Worksheet
Use this to answer two questions before you spend more on leads: is the money bringing leads in actually turning into clients, and how much are you burning in time and money trying to convert them manually? It is not perfect accounting, it is a decision lens.
What a client costs you today
Cost per lead
$0
Cost per new client
$0
LTV vs client cost
—
Rough gut-check: if a client’s lifetime value is not comfortably above 3× what it costs to win them, every lead that leaks hurts twice, once in the lost client, once in the wasted ad spend that produced the lead.
What the manual response layer costs you
Time + money burn / yr
$0
Follow-up leakage / yr
$0
Total at stake / yr
$0
Fill in the fields below to estimate whether this lead leak is worth fixing.
Start with what a lead already costs you and what a client is worth. This answers whether the money spent bringing leads in is worth it, before anything gets fixed.
Everything spent to make the phone ring: ads, directories, SEO retainers, lead-gen services. Use 0 if leads are purely referral.
Every inbound enquiry: forms, calls, emails, messages, referrals.
Of every lead that comes in today, the share that ends up a paying client.
Total a client pays across every purchase, renewal, or repeat visit over their entire time as a customer, not one transaction.
The direct cost of staff time spent handling leads by hand: checking inboxes, deciding who is worth chasing, retyping details between systems, updating the CRM, and sending manual follow-ups.
Wage plus super and other employment costs: what an hour of this person actually costs the business, not their take-home pay.
Minutes and rate are treated as one average across all staff entered above, not summed per person. If time lost or pay rate varies a lot between staff, average those figures yourself first, or the total will skew.
The hours the owner, or your best salesperson, gets pulled into chasing leads, checking follow-ups, and doing admin instead of the higher-value work only they can do: closing, renewals, client reviews, delivery.
What that hour is worth spent on the highest-value activity they would do instead, e.g. closing new business or renewal reviews, not a salary rate.
Leads that go cold because the reply was slow, the second follow-up never happened, or nobody owned the enquiry. This reuses your leads, conversion rate, and LTV from Layer I, the only question is how much of the leak a faster, more consistent response could recover.
The share of currently-lost or delayed leads you might recover with fast, consistent follow-up. Keep this conservative. The point is not to inflate ROI, it is to decide whether the leak deserves a proper review. Drag to see the range.
What it costs to produce the follow-ups themselves, whether someone writes them from scratch each time, adapts generic templates, or you pay a copywriter or VA to handle them.
Every follow-up costs fresh time and depends on whoever is writing it that day.
Copywriter, VA, or follow-up tools paid for specifically to keep leads warm.
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