What a removals lead actually costs you
£12 a lead sounds cheap until you work out how many you have to buy before one of them turns into a job. Here is the real arithmetic.
Marcus Bell
Head of Network, eHaul
Every removals operator we speak to can tell you the price of a lead. Very few can tell you the price of a job — and those are wildly different numbers.
A lead is an introduction. A job is a booking with a date, an address and money attached. The gap between the two is where most small removals businesses quietly lose their margin, and it is worth putting actual figures on it.
The arithmetic nobody shows you
Take a lead site charging £12 per enquiry. On paper that is nothing against a £480 move. But the same enquiry has been sold to four other firms, so you are not buying a job — you are buying a one-in-five chance of a conversation.
- Roughly a third of purchased leads never answer the phone at all
- Of those who do, many are price-checking against a quote they already have
- When five firms quote, the winning price is almost always the lowest
- The lead fee is charged whether or not any of that goes your way
Work it through at a one-in-eight conversion rate, which is not pessimistic, and each booked job has cost you £96 in lead fees before a wheel has turned. Add the two or three hours you spent quoting and it is comfortably over £150.
The hidden cost is the discount
The lead fee is the visible cost. The invisible one is what competitive bidding does to your price. When a customer is holding five quotes, the only lever you control is your own margin, and it only ever moves in one direction.
“I was spending £300 a month on lead sites and half the people never picked up.”
Two firms quoting the same job at £520 and £430 are not competing on quality. They are competing on who is prepared to absorb the fuel, the wear and the second pair of hands out of their own pocket.
What a fixed cost changes
A subscription flips the maths. You know exactly what the work costs before the month starts, and the price of each move is published on the brief before you accept it. There is no bidding, because the job is allocated to one crew.
On a £40-a-week Standard plan you are paying £20 per assigned move. Not per enquiry, per phone call or per quote — per actual booking with a date and an address on it. That is a number you can plan a business around.