How many enquiries does it take to fill a week?
Enquiries are not jobs. Between the two sit an unanswered phone, a quote nobody chased and a customer who booked someone else. This walks a month of enquiries through each stage and shows where the drop actually happens.
Your numbers
The answer
Enquiries that become invoiced work
33.6%
33.6 jobs from 100 enquiries
Answered
85
15 never reached a conversation
Booked
36.6
48.5 handled but not booked
Completed
33.6
2.9 lost after booking
Revenue
$40,351
$403.51 per enquiry received
Advertising cost per completed job
$267.65
100 enquiries at $90.00
How this was worked out
- Answered
- 100 × 85% = 85
- Booked
- 85 × 43% = 36.6
- Completed
- 36.6 × 92% = 33.6
- Lead-to-job rate
- 85% × 43% × 92% = 33.6%
- Revenue
- 33.6 × $1,200.00 = $40,351
What a five-point improvement at each stage is worth, on its own
| Stage | Now | At +5 points | Extra jobs a month | Extra revenue a year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Answering | 85% | 90% | 2 | $28,483 |
| Booking | 43% | 48% | 3.9 | $56,304 |
| Completion | 92% | 97% | 1.8 | $26,316 |
Five points is used for all three so they are comparable, not because five is achievable everywhere. A stage already at 95% cannot gain five points, and the row will say so by returning almost nothing.
What to do with this
- 33.6 of 100 enquiries became invoiced work — 33.6%. Every enquiry is worth $403.51 of revenue on average, and each completed job costs $267.65 in advertising to produce.
- The biggest single leak is booking the job: 48.5 enquiries a month stop there.
- Getting the answer rate to 95% would add about $4,747 of revenue a month without buying a single extra enquiry. That is the cheapest work available in this table.
- Measure this from your own records once a quarter. The booking rate in particular drifts with who is answering the phone, and nobody notices until the cost per job moves.
Change anything above and the link in your address bar changes with it, so you can send the exact result to whoever needs to see it. Nothing you type is sent anywhere — the whole calculation happens in your browser.
What this does, and how the maths works
What it does
- Takes a month of enquiries and drops them through four stages: answered, booked, kept, completed.
- Reports the compound rate — what share of enquiries ended as invoiced work — which is almost always lower than people expect, because four rates multiply rather than average.
- Shows the revenue recovered by fixing each stage on its own, so you can see which one is worth attention first.
How to use it
- Enter the enquiries you received last month. Calls and forms together.
- Enter the share you actually answered or replied to inside the window a customer will wait. For emergency work that window is minutes.
- Set the booking rate. If you do not know yours, the selector carries published trade figures — read the caveat under it before you use one.
- Enter the share of booked jobs that survive to completion, and your average job value.
The formula
- Answered = enquiries × answer rate
- Booked = answered × booking rate
- Completed = booked × completion rate
- Lead-to-job rate = completed ÷ enquiries
- Revenue = completed × average job value
Reading the answer
- Four rates multiply. 85% × 43% × 90% is 33%, not 73% — which is why a funnel that looks healthy at every stage can deliver a third of the enquiries as work.
- The stage with the biggest gap between where you are and where you could plausibly be is the one to fix, and it is almost never the last one.
- Compare the recovered revenue in the table against what the same money would buy in extra enquiries. Fixing the phone is usually cheaper than buying more leads to feed the same leak.
What it cannot tell you
There is no Australian lead-to-job benchmark for any trade. The booking rates offered here are from a 2022 study of more than 3,000 businesses in the United States and Canada, and they measure inbound CALL to booked job — not enquiry to job. They are a shape to start from, not your number.
Where every figure on this page came from
Every default in the calculator above is either your own number or a figure from one of the studies below, with the market and the sample stated. Nothing here is an estimate somebody felt was about right, and no United States figure is wearing an Australian label.
ServiceTitan, Data Report: Average Call Booking Rates
ServiceTitan · 2022 · measured in US & Canada · medium confidence
More than 3,000 trade businesses across the United States and Canada, June 2022.
Measures inbound CALL to booked job, not lead to job, and the fieldwork is from 2022. There is no Australian equivalent.
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about working with SoudCoh
Have more questions? Let's chat!
Book a Free Strategy CallNobody publishes this for Australia, for any trade. What does exist is a 2022 ServiceTitan study of more than 3,000 trade businesses in the United States and Canada, which found inbound calls booked at 43% for plumbing, 41% for electrical and 38% for air conditioning, with an overall figure of 42%. That is call-to-booking, not enquiry-to-job, and it is four years old and from another market. Use it as a shape and measure your own — the same study found businesses with 25 or more technicians booked 59% of calls while those with fewer than five booked 24%, so the spread inside one market is wider than the gap between trades.
Because the stages multiply. Answering 85% of enquiries, booking 43% of those and completing 92% of the bookings is 33% overall, not the 73% you get by averaging the three. This is the single most common piece of arithmetic that businesses get wrong about their own funnel, and it is why an account can look fine at every individual stage and still deliver a third of what was paid for.
You paid for it, so yes — and that is precisely why it belongs in the calculation. Excluding missed calls from the lead count makes the booking rate look better and the cost per job look lower, while the money leaves the account either way. If you want the flattering number, measure booking rate separately; if you want the true cost per job, start from every enquiry the advertising bought.
Whichever loses the most enquiries in absolute terms, which is usually answering. It is also the cheapest to fix — a call-answering service or a disciplined callback rule costs a fraction of the advertising already being wasted on calls nobody picks up. The table on this page prices each stage so the comparison is in dollars rather than percentages.
Count from the enquiry, not from the quote. Take a month of every call and form, mark each as booked or not, and reconcile against invoices. Doing it from memory produces a number about ten to fifteen points too high in almost every business we have measured, because the enquiries that went nowhere are the ones nobody remembers.
Run these next
One number rarely settles anything on its own. These three answer the questions this one raises.
Cost of missed calls
Put an annual figure on unanswered calls: how many are gone for good, the jobs behind them, and the gross profit that leaves with them.
ServiceTitan 2022
Quote win rate
Turn quotes sent and quotes won into a win rate, the revenue behind each quote, and what a few points of improvement is worth against writing more quotes.
Your own numbers only — no benchmark used
True cost per booked job
Add management fees, tools and tracking to your media spend, divide by booked jobs rather than leads, and see what is left of the margin after acquisition.
ATO
We will read
your real ones.
Send us the account rather than the estimate. We will tell you what it is actually costing to win a job, which part of the chain is leaking, and whether it is worth fixing — before anyone asks you to sign anything.