Most companies track cost per lead, which is why this number surprises them. A lead is a row in a database. A qualified meeting is a person who showed up and could plausibly buy. The gap between those two costs is where a marketing budget quietly disappears.
Fully loaded rep time, plus tools, plus agency and media spend, divided by qualified meetings held.
Fully loaded means salary plus tax, benefits, equity, and the management overhead behind them. Roughly 1.25 to 1.4 times base. And held, not booked. Those two corrections alone usually move the number 30 to 50 percent in the unflattering direction.
There is no universal number, because it scales with your deal size. As a rough frame, under 10 percent of ACV is comfortable and over 25 percent is a problem you should already be treating as urgent. The direction matters more than the level: falling quarter over quarter while meeting volume holds steady is the shape you want.
Counting booked meetings instead of held ones. No-shows are not conversations, and they are the single most common way this number gets quietly improved. The second most common is using base salary instead of loaded cost, which understates the real figure by a third.
Two ways, and they pull in the same direction. A site that answers the hard question and publishes the price turns the wrong people away before they take a slot, so you stop paying for meetings that were never going to close. And the right people, who would previously have bounced without a reason to believe you, book instead. The denominator rises while the numerator stays where it is.
Worked example
| 4 AEs, loaded at $150,000 | $600,000 |
| Tools and media for the period | $120,000 |
| Qualified meetings held | 240 |
$3,000 per qualified meeting
Now assume the site turns away 20 percent of the wrong-fit meetings and converts an extra 30 right-fit visitors. Same spend, 270 better meetings, and the number falls to $2,667 without anyone buying more media.
No single number tells you much. Together they tell you where the trust is leaking and what it costs.
The Trust Diagnostic takes four minutes and costs nothing. The calculator on the finance page prices your own leak. Neither one asks for an email.
Score your site freeReady to talk? Book the 45 minutes →