The working, with the two ratios that decide everything and the break-even that tells you what a lead is worth to your practice specifically.
Most brokers can say what they pay per lead and very few can say what they pay per client. The second number is the one that decides whether buying leads works, and it takes four inputs you already have.
Leads per client is one divided by your contact rate multiplied by your conversion rate from contacted to client. Cost per client is that figure multiplied by your cost per lead, plus the adviser time consumed along the way.
| Input | Where it comes from | How sensitive the result is to it |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per lead | The supplier price list | Least sensitive of the four |
| Contact rate | Share reaching a live conversation in six attempts | Most sensitive by a wide margin |
| Conversion rate | Share of contacted becoming clients | Substantial |
| Adviser time per lead | About 35 minutes across six attempts | Frequently larger than the lead cost |
Why contact rate dominates: It sits in the denominator and it varies more between suppliers than price does. A supplier whose records reach twice as many people halves your leads per client, which no unit discount matches.
The ceiling, derived from your own revenue rather than from anything a supplier says. Take the revenue a settled client produces across the relationship, decide what share of it you will spend on acquisition, and that figure is the maximum.
For insurance this is where brokers routinely undercount. Revenue is recurring, so a client who stays on the books for years is worth a multiple of first-year commission. Using first-year revenue as the base sets an allowable cost far below what the economics support and rules out quality supply that would have paid for itself.
Divide your allowable cost per client by your leads per client. That is the most you can pay for a lead, and it is specific to your practice. Two brokers with identical books and different contact rates have genuinely different break-even prices, which is why no published market rate can answer this.
The third is the subtle one. A lead bought six weeks ago with a three month sales cycle is not a loss, and counting it as one makes every recent month look worse than it is.
Quarterly for the full model, monthly for the four operating numbers that feed it. Contact rate, attempts per lead and median time to first attempt move fast enough to manage monthly; conversion to client does not.
Where Lead Foundry sits, in plain terms: Lead Foundry currently supplies life insurance enquiries in New Zealand. Mortgage supply opens when LoanWatch launches. The model here is yours to run on your own numbers, and nothing in it is a projection of what any broker will achieve.
Divide one by your contact rate multiplied by your conversion rate from contacted to client, which gives leads per client. Multiply that by your cost per lead, then add adviser time at roughly 35 minutes per lead across a six-attempt cadence. The result is your true cost per acquired client.
Whatever sits below your allowable cost per client, which you derive from the revenue a settled client produces across the relationship and the share of it you will spend on acquisition. For insurance, use relationship revenue rather than first-year commission, because recurring revenue raises the ceiling substantially.
Contact rate, by a wide margin. It sits in the denominator and varies more between suppliers than price does. A supplier whose records reach twice as many people halves your leads per client, which no unit-price discount can match.
Quarterly for the full model, monthly for the operating numbers that feed it. Contact rate, attempts per lead and median time to first attempt move quickly enough to manage monthly. Conversion to client does not, and recalculating it monthly means reacting to variance rather than to performance.