Every company selling electrician leads advertises a price per lead. None of them advertise the number that decides whether it pays. Here is the arithmetic, and how to run it on whatever you are being quoted.
Three ways, and they behave completely differently. You can buy them from a marketplace, rent them through advertising, or earn them through your own listing, reviews and site. Most electricians use all three without noticing that only one of them gets cheaper over time.
The short version
Divide what you spend by the jobs you actually booked, not by the leads you received. That single change usually reorders every channel you are running.
An illustrative example, not a client result. Substitute your own numbers, because yours are the only ones that matter.
| Shared marketplace lead | Your own enquiry | |
|---|---|---|
| Price you are quoted | $35 per lead | No per-lead purchase fee, but the system still costs money |
| Others sold the same lead | Often several | Nobody |
| Illustrative close rate | 1 in 8 | 1 in 3 |
| Leads needed per booked job | 8 | 3 |
| Cost per booked job | $280 | System spend ÷ booked jobs |
| Direction next year | Same or higher | Lower, as the asset builds |
An enquiry you earned is not free. It carries the cost of the profile, site and reviews that produced it. It simply has no per-lead fee attached, which is why the only fair comparison is system spend divided by booked jobs. The close rates above are illustrative. The point is not the specific figures, it is that a $35 lead and a $280 job are the same purchase described two different ways.
Price is the seventh most important thing about a lead. These six come first.
Sold to you alone, or to several of you at once. This single variable can move your close rate more than anything you say on the call.
Someone who searched for an electrician is not the same as someone who filled in a form to see prices. Both are called leads.
On shared leads you are racing. First to answer usually wins, and the other three paid for nothing.
A lead for work you do not want, at a distance you will not travel, at a price you cannot do it for, is a cost with no upside.
After the job, is that customer yours to contact again, or does the platform keep them? Repeat work is where the margin lives.
If you cannot trace a lead to a booked job, you cannot run the arithmetic above, and every argument about channels becomes opinion.
The diary has a genuine hole this week, you are entering a new area, or you are testing whether demand exists for a service before building around it.
Your own enquiries can fill the diary, or the cost per booked job stops clearing your margin. Both are arithmetic, not instinct.
It is the only thing you do. A business whose entire lead flow is rented from a marketplace has no asset, no pricing power and no way to stop.
The failure mode is not buying leads. It is buying them for three years and having nothing to show for it when you stop. More on that split in compounding, rented and bought channels.
Buying leads while enquiries go unanswered is the most expensive habit in this trade. You pay for the lead, a competitor books the job, and the arithmetic above gets worse without anyone noticing why.
Three things cost nothing and improve every lead you already receive:
Do those for one month and rerun the arithmetic. Most electricians find the problem was never the number of leads.
The Growth Score checks the five things that decide whether an enquiry becomes a job, and estimates what each gap is costing you every month. Run it before you buy another lead.
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