Most canvassing companies can quote their cost per sale. Far fewer can quote their true cost per lead, because the real number hides across payroll, turnover, re-walked territories, and doors that produce nothing. Here is the framework for calculating yours honestly, with a worked example you can rebuild with your own numbers.
The basic math
Cost per lead is everything you spend putting reps on doors, divided by the qualified leads those doors produce:
(Rep compensation + management + recruiting and training + territory and travel costs + tools) ÷ qualified leads generated
The formula is trivial. The honesty is in what you include.
A worked example
The numbers below are illustrative inputs, not industry benchmarks. Replace every one with your own.
Say a rep costs you $4,000 a month fully loaded, works 20 field days, and hits 60 doors a day, so 1,200 doors a month. Suppose 30 percent of doors get answered, in line with what reps self-reported in interviews we commissioned, giving 360 conversations. If 5 percent of conversations become a qualified lead, that is 18 leads.
$4,000 ÷ 18 = about $222 per qualified lead, before you have paid a closer or delivered anything.
Now watch the sensitivity. If the answer rate drops to 25 percent, you get 15 leads and the cost climbs to about $267. If conversation quality slips one point, from 5 percent to 4 percent, you are near $278. Small doorstep erosion moves your lead cost by 20 to 25 percent, which is why "the doors got harder" shows up in finance before it shows up in field reports.
The costs most companies leave out
Turnover. Door-to-door burns reps fast, and every departure means recruiting, training, and weeks of below-average production. If a rep costs you $3,000 to replace and ramps for a month, and you replace half your team a year, that is real money that belongs in the numerator.
Re-walked territory. When 70 percent of doors yield nothing and you cannot tell not-home from not-interested, territories get walked again. The second pass costs the same and yields less.
Complaints and reputation. A homeowner complaint costs manager time, and a bad neighborhood reputation raises the difficulty of every future door on the street. It never appears on an invoice, and it is one of the most expensive lines you have.
The knock-only blind spot. Homes with no-soliciting signs and homes that never answer produce zero at any spend. In most operations, that is the majority of the territory generating nothing while costing full walking time.
Where the leverage is
Look at the worked example again. The lever is not rep pay, it is the denominator: how many doors produce anything at all. Every improvement compounds: fewer wasted second passes, cleaner attribution of what each door actually said, and a way to get value from the doors that will never open.
That last one is the EntryVerified case in one sentence: at a participating home, your rep does not knock or ring, they scan the sign and submit your offer in under a minute, converting a permanently dead door into a delivered, documented offer that the homeowner reviews on their own time. A submission is not a guaranteed lead and should not be counted as one. It is coverage of territory that previously produced nothing except walking cost, at seconds per home instead of minutes, with zero complaint risk. Run it through your own formula and see what it does to the denominator.
The short version
Price your leads with everything included: turnover, re-walks, management drag, and the majority of doors that produce nothing. Then attack the denominator. The cheapest lead improvement in door-to-door is getting something deliverable out of the doors that were never going to open.
EntryVerified gives your team a way to reach homes that would otherwise produce nothing — with every submission attributed to the rep who made it.