Take one month of your current funnel and work it forward to revenue. Then change only the numbers a given system would change and work it forward again. The difference between the two months, revenue gained plus operations cost saved, is the return. Divide it by what the system costs to build and run and you have the ROI. It takes seven inputs and about ten minutes.
The arithmetic below is the whole model. Put your own numbers through it once and you will know which lever is worth pulling before anyone quotes you for pulling it.
The seven inputs
You need these for the month you are measuring. Rough is fine. What matters is that the same numbers feed both scenarios.
- 1.Monthly ad spend.
- 2.Cost per lead. Spend divided by this gives leads per month.
- 3.Lead-to-appointment rate. The share of leads who book a call.
- 4.Show rate. The share of booked calls that happen.
- 5.Close rate. The share of calls that turn into a deal.
- 6.Average deal value.
- 7.Ops hours per lead. How long your team spends qualifying, chasing, and scheduling each one.
The calculator's defaults are $8,000 of spend at $95 per lead, a 22% appointment rate, 70% show, 25% close, a $4,500 deal, and 0.4 hours of ops per lead. Those describe a plausible service business, not a benchmark, so replace them with yours.
Work the current month forward
Spend divided by cost per lead gives leads. Leads times appointment rate gives appointments. Appointments times show rate gives calls held. Calls times close rate gives deals. Deals times deal value gives revenue.
With the defaults that is 84 leads, 18.5 appointments, 13 calls, 3.2 deals, and about $14,600 in revenue. The same 84 leads at 0.4 hours each is 34 ops hours a month, which at a loaded $65 an hour is about $2,200 in labour.
Change only what the system changes
A lever touches one or two stages of the funnel, and the estimate should move only those stages. Everything downstream still runs through your show rate and close rate, because a new system does not make your closer better at closing.
- An outbound system adds qualified meetings on top of the paid funnel. We model it as 28 extra qualified leads a month and leave every rate alone.
- A paid media rebuild lowers cost per lead and raises the appointment rate, because better targeting sends fewer unqualified people into the funnel. We model it as 32% off cost per lead and 15% on the appointment rate.
- AI reply and automation cuts the ops hours per lead and raises the appointment rate, because a lead who hears back in two minutes books more often than one who hears back tomorrow. We model it as 70% fewer ops hours and 25% on the appointment rate.
Those are the baseline lifts we plan with, set conservatively. The calculator caps the appointment rate at 85% however many levers you stack, since no funnel books nearly everyone.
The worked example
Turn on outbound only, with the defaults. Leads go from 84 to 112. Appointments go from 18.5 to 24.7, calls from 13 to 17.3, deals from 3.2 to 4.3, and revenue from about $14,600 to about $19,450. That is a revenue lift of roughly $4,860 a month.
Ops hours go the other way. More leads means more chasing, so the ops cost rises by about $730 a month. Net lift is about $4,100 a month. Show that increase in the estimate rather than hide it.
For the payback line the calculator assumes a $15,000 build cost. That figure is a placeholder, not a quote. Trust the monthly lift, which comes from your own inputs.
Where estimates usually go wrong
Three mistakes account for most of the inflated ROI numbers we see.
- Applying a lift to the whole funnel. A faster reply time raises the appointment rate. It does nothing to the close rate.
- Counting revenue and ignoring hours. More leads cost more hours to work unless automation takes those hours away. Both lines belong in the number.
- Using someone else's rates. Your show rate and close rate are the two inputs that swing the result most, and they are the two you already know.
Run it with your own numbers. If you want us to walk through them with you and say which lever would move first, book a call. You can also use the systems we have already built and see what the reporting looks like once one of these is running.