More leads aren’t automatically more work. They’re more routing decisions with a price attached.
That matters because you can make the phone ring, fill the board, and quietly trade a compact truck-day for a sequence of low-value detours. The customer sees a repair. You bought a lead, answered it, reserved an arrival window, drove the truck, diagnosed the problem, won or lost the authorization, completed the work, and collected.
A price that notices only the repair line is pricing the last stage of a much longer machine.
Call the control point route-aware price floor. It’s the minimum commercial result a job needs once lead cost, completion probability, travel, paid technician time, and the next-best use of the truck are in the picture.
The map isn’t an operations detail after the sale. It’s part of the offer. Slightly inconvenient, I know.
The Lead Is Not the Job
A lead price isn’t customer-acquisition cost. A charged lead may never become a live contact, booking, authorization, completion, paid invoice, or bank deposit. Keep those events separate under one lead ID of your own.
The corpus’s invented Northline HVAC call makes the sequence visible. Lead L-0715-18 enters late morning carrying a $74 Local Services charge, the customer books an afternoon arrival window minutes later, authorizes the repair on site, and pays the $486 invoice before the technician leaves.
The platform charge belongs to the lead when it enters, not when the repair is won.
That’s why three acquisition measures belong on your same report:
- Lead cost = attributed marketing spend ÷ charged leads.
- Cost per booking = attributed marketing spend ÷ booked appointments.
- Acquisition cost per completed job = attributed marketing spend ÷ completed jobs.
In the corpus’s invented monthly cohort, $4,800 of advertising generates 60 charged leads, 18 bookings, and 15 completed jobs. That’s $80 per lead, about $267 per booking, and $320 per completed job. If a completed job produces only $275 before marketing, buying more of that lead type destroys contribution while your sales dashboard smiles.
Name your close-rate denominator too. In Northline’s invented cooling cohort, 19 of 32 charged leads book and 15 of those 32 become paid jobs — which also makes paid jobs 15 of 19 booked appointments.
Each rate can be useful. None of them means “close rate” on its own.
The Route Is the Cost Object
Treat the completed job as your cost object, but don’t pretend it begins at the driveway.
The job-level bridge starts with collected price and removes parts, field labor and burden, subcontractors, permits, disposal, payment charges, acquisition cost, and a realistic warranty-return allowance. What remains is contribution for dispatch, office payroll, software, insurance, facilities, fleet ownership, debt service, and profit.
Then include your route. Driving, parking, access, restocking, missing parts, waiting in an appointment window, failed access, and callbacks all consume paid capacity without creating another ticket.
Track miles per completed job, windshield minutes per job, completed jobs per paid route hour, first-time completion rate, and contribution per truck-day. Count the failed and callback visits. A denominator that politely forgets them isn’t density.
Northline reserves a 90-minute afternoon slot for the lead. The inserted call is estimated at 18 minutes and 11.8 km from the prior stop, but the full route moves from 62 km to 78 km.
The call adds 16 km to the route, not 11.8. It uses 76 on-site minutes. The office-to-customer distance would answer a different question, which is a dangerous little hobby in dispatch.
The same point appears in the corpus’s invented eight-hour route. Five completed calls and 150 minutes of travel become 90 minutes when the calls cluster, releasing one hour. That hour is worth another ticket only if demand, parts, technician skill, and the remaining appointment windows permit another completion. If they do, and the job contributes $180, the route design earned $180 before you bought another lead.
Service Zones
The corpus doesn’t supply universal zone cutoffs or one correct remote-call minimum. Good.
The Census’s housing-units-per-square-mile urban delineation thresholds are statistical boundaries, not viable-route thresholds. A made-up distance threshold is just a price book wearing a fake moustache.
Your policy records local observed bands, then states what each band is allowed to consume.
| Service-zone policy | Lead cost | Travel band | Minimum ticket rule | Close-rate record | Route-density measure | Same-day capacity rule |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Compatible route | Record the source charge against the persistent lead ID | Compare the complete route before and after insertion | Use the approved price-book minimum or diagnostic charge | Report booked/charged and paid/charged separately | Miles and windshield minutes per completed job; contribution per truck-day | Book only when a compatible window, skill, and parts position exists |
| Forced detour | Keep the charge even if the job is declined, unless the platform credits it | Record added distance, backtracking, waiting, and paid travel | Require the zone’s approved price or an authorized scheduling exception | Inspect whether conversion rises only because the offer was discounted | Include failed access and callback visits in paid route time | Protect capacity for scheduled work and higher-contribution calls |
| Remote or edge route | Separate source and service-line cohorts; do not blend the average | Treat postal code as a label, not proof of density | Use a named remote-zone, travel, or minimum-invoice rule in the price book | State the exact cohort and denominator | Measure completed economic work within the actual route | Accept only when the date, crew, and route can complete the work |
Minimum charges and diagnostic fees exist because sending a qualified person and a stocked vehicle has a cost before any repair is sold. Northline’s invented ticket carries $119 for the diagnostic and service call, then $247 and $120 for the two repairs. If you credit a diagnostic charge against later work, that credit is a conditional discount. Record it as one.
Where the Truck-Day Goes
Use your numbers to locate the broken stage before you turn on more demand.
Charged leads rise, but cost per completed job rises faster → acquisition or qualification is broken
You’re treating lead cost as acquisition cost. Compare charged leads, live contacts, bookings, completions, paid jobs, and source charges under the same ID.
Google says some poor Local Services contacts receive automated credits within 24 hours, and credits usually reach the account within 30 days. Preserve that vendor event separately. Out-of-area, unreachable, badly matched, cancelled, and unapproved contacts have different fixes.
Bookings rise, but paid-job close rate falls → sales, scope, or capacity is broken
A booked arrival window isn’t an authorized repair, and an authorized repair isn’t a paid invoice. Keep booked, authorized, completed, paid, and deposited separate. One generic “won” field is a fine way to lose the useful answer.
The route gets longer while the ticket stays flat → price and dispatch rules are broken
Measure your incremental route distance from the complete route before and after insertion. If a promised window creates backtracking, a nearby call can be expensive.
Apply the service-zone minimum, schedule it beside compatible work, or decline it. The map needs commercial authority.
Close rate improves after discounts, but contribution per truck hour falls → the offer is buying demand without testing its value
A discount can pull a purchase forward, create a reference price, and train the next negotiation. Preserve canonical price, concession, consideration received, authority, expiry, and final net price. Then compare repeat behavior and contribution after the discount, not the sales spike alone.
Technicians are busy but contribution per truck-day falls → route density or job mix is broken
Your average ticket can conceal an expensive mix of low-margin parts, long drives, access failures, callbacks, and slow authorization. Compare contribution per truck hour across service line, source, zone, and travel band.
“Busy” is a payroll condition, not a margin measure.
More emergency leads arrive during a peak, but completion slips or high-value work is displaced → capacity is broken
Another inquiry has value only when your crew, parts, skills, and appointment windows can turn it into a completed job. Marketing at peak should be governed by expected contribution from the next completed job, not the number of names waiting on the screen.
The Price Floor
A route-aware floor isn’t a market-wide list price. It’s your walk-away boundary under stated scope and terms.
It begins with the cost that disappears if you don’t accept the job, then adds the contribution required to justify consuming constrained capacity.
A floor can be lower in a compact route with spare time and higher when the call fragments a nearly full day. Same repair, different economic delivery.
Don’t build your field labor from base wage alone. The corpus reports mean hourly wages near $34.70 for plumbers and pipefitters and $31.14 for HVAC and refrigeration mechanics, and both figures exclude employer benefits, overtime premiums, and other burdens.
A separate measure places total compensation for those occupations near $48.79 per hour worked, roughly a third of it benefits.
Neither national number is your local billable cost. Both are a warning against neat arithmetic.
Likewise, the IRS business mileage convention is a tax and reimbursement convention, not proof of a van’s marginal cost. Separate the fuel and maintenance that vary with use from the insurance, depreciation, leases, and vehicle payments that continue while the van is parked. Price needs your own cost boundary, not a convenient national substitution.
Your price book then turns the floor into an enforceable quote. Give every service line an effective date, tax treatment, included labor and materials, warranty treatment, diagnostic charge, minimum invoice, travel zone, after-hours rule, and surcharge trigger.
Record the original price, discount code, approver, and timestamp when an exception occurs. A technician can’t repair the economics later by remembering why the ticket changed.
Monday
Map last week’s completed, failed-access, and callback visits by service line, source, and actual travel band.
For each row, keep your lead charge, status sequence, collected ticket, job-specific costs, windshield minutes, on-site minutes, and the route before and after insertion.
Then build three comparisons:
- Ticket and contribution per truck hour by travel band.
- Cost per charged lead, booking, completed job, and paid job by source.
- Booked/charged and paid/charged close rates by source, service line, and zone.
Set one rule for your worst band: a price-book minimum, a remote-zone surcharge, a compatible-route scheduling condition, or an approval requirement.
Don’t set a fictional universal threshold because a spreadsheet likes an empty cell. Review it once the route has enough completed jobs to show whether the rule protects contribution or merely moves low-value demand into a different label.
Lead volume is a demand measure. Contribution per truck hour is an operating result. A busy truck is capacity consumed. A dense route is capacity sold well.
Price the route, not just the repair. Buy the next lead only when the next completed job earns its place on the truck.