Across our engagements, AI growth marketing produces highly qualified leads at $30 to $60, booked sales calls at $150 typical, roughly one booked call for every two to three qualified leads, and close rates near 30% for well-established businesses. These are our benchmarks: the bar we hold our own campaigns to, measured across verticals.
Most marketing benchmarks you find online average together good campaigns and bad ones, qualified leads and junk form fills. That makes them useless for planning. This page publishes the numbers we actually run against, defines the terms behind them, and shows how they compound into an acquisition equation.
One framing matter before the numbers. Benchmarks describe typical performance across engagements. They are our internal bar. The formal commitment in a WRKS engagement is the 90-day money-back guarantee, agreed per client with its own targets.
What Does a Qualified Lead Cost?
Across our engagements, a highly qualified lead costs $30 to $60. In the most niche verticals, anything under $100 remains strong.
The load-bearing word is “qualified.” For a law firm, a qualified lead matches the firm’s exact case criteria across roughly ten data points before it ever reaches the intake team. That standard is what makes the $30 to $60 range meaningful: these are prospects interested in the service who only need to be closed, produced by qualification funnels built around the client’s growth metric.
Raw lead costs from generic campaigns run lower and convert worse. A cheap unqualified lead costs more than an expensive qualified one by the time your team finishes chasing it.
What Does a Booked Call Cost?
Across our engagements, a booked sales call costs $150 typical. Anything under $250 is strong.
At $30 to $60 per qualified lead, that works out to roughly one booked call for every two to three qualified leads. The ratio holds even for hard B2B targets, such as SaaS companies going after founders doing $100K+ per month with 30 to 50 employees.
What Close Rate Should You Expect?
Well-established businesses close around 30% of booked calls in our benchmark set. Newer offers and unproven sales processes land lower until the pitch matures. The close rate is the one number in the equation the marketing system influences least, which is why we track it separately: it tells you whether the constraint is the pipeline or the close.
The Acquisition Equation
The point of growth marketing is turning these layers into a formula. Lead cost times call rate times close rate gives you cost per client:
- $30 to $60 per qualified lead
- One call per 2 to 3 leads puts a booked call near $150
- A 30% close rate puts a new client near $500 in ad spend
Run the same math with your own revenue per client and you have a planning instrument: a dollar goes in, a known amount comes out. That equation, once proven, is what makes spend a decision instead of a gamble. It is also what makes a performance-based engagement safe for a provider to sign.
Why AI Reaches These Numbers Faster
The benchmarks come from iteration speed. An AI growth marketing system tests hundreds of creative variants in the first weeks, reads live campaign data, cuts losers, and ships new campaigns the same day. Every qualified conversion also trains the ad platform’s algorithm toward the client’s real buyer, so the account gets cheaper as it runs. Human teams reach good numbers too. They reach them slower, and slow iteration burns budget that never comes back.
Common Questions
Are these numbers a guarantee?
No. These are benchmarks: typical performance across our engagements and the bar we hold ourselves to. The guarantee in a WRKS engagement is separate and formal, with targets agreed per client at the start and a 90-day money-back clause behind them.
Do the benchmarks hold in expensive verticals?
The qualified-lead range widens to about $100 in the most niche verticals, and it stays strong there because qualification does the heavy lifting. The booked-call and close-rate layers hold across verticals.
What if my business sells directly instead of booking calls?
Straight-to-purchase businesses track cost per purchase instead of the lead-to-call chain, and the equation logic is identical. Purchase-side expectations differ enough that we set them per engagement rather than publishing one number.
The equation is the product. WRKS runs AI growth marketing engagements that build it for your business, with revenue targets agreed up front and a 90-day money-back guarantee behind them.