The Next-Gen Brand Lab
Budgets and unit economics
How many leads does it take to book one unit?
Last updated 2026-09-09
Plan on 100 raw leads per booking until your own sales data proves better. The chain behind that number: roughly 60% of raw leads meet a reasonable qualification bar, and a strong sales team closes around 10% of those — which lands near six bookings per hundred qualified, or one booking per hundred raw leads once real-world slippage is included. It is deliberately the pessimistic case, because a budget built on the optimistic case has no room to be wrong.
Why plan on the worst case
Because the cost of being wrong is asymmetric. If you budget for 100 leads per booking and achieve 60, you have a surplus and a happy sales team. If you budget for 40 and it takes 100, you run out of money in the middle of a launch, which is the single most expensive moment to stop advertising — the campaign loses its learning, the momentum resets, and restarting costs more than continuing would have.
Working it into a budget
Take your target bookings for the launch window, multiply by 100 for raw leads, multiply by your working cost per lead. At a ₹400 CPL, ten bookings implies roughly ₹4,00,000 of media across the window. Then sanity-check the other way: divide the media by the number of units and ask whether that per-unit marketing cost is acceptable against your margin. If it is not, the problem is the price or the product, and more advertising will not solve it.
When to replace this number with your own
As soon as you have 200 leads and a full sales cycle behind them. Your own ratio beats any benchmark, including this one. Until then, the benchmark stops you from planning on a number somebody invented to win the pitch.
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