Nobody invoices you for building a call list by hand, so the line never reaches a budget. It reaches payroll instead — buried inside “sales salaries”, sitting next to the work that actually sells.
This piece pulls it back out. What follows is a costing with its assumptions in the open. None of them comes from a study we could not point you to. All of them are meant to be swapped for yours — that is the whole exercise.
The assumptions, yours to replace
Take a team of four reps working B2B, calling companies from a list they assemble themselves. The figures below are assumed, not measured — which is why they sit in a table rather than in a sentence.
- Reps on the team
- 4
- Working days per month
- 21
- List preparation per day
- 45 min
- Per person, per month
- 15.75 h
Sixty-three hours is not an abstract figure. It is two and a half weeks of one person’s work, every month, spent clicking through listings and retyping phone numbers.
Now in money
An hour of a rep costs more than their hourly rate: employer contributions, a desk, tool licences and a manager’s attention all sit on top. Take a fully loaded hour at 60 PLN — the currency the product is priced in. If yours differs, swap it and run the sum again.
- Team time per month
- 63 h
- Fully loaded hourly cost
- 60 PLN
- Monthly cost
- 3,780 PLN
This number is derived from the assumptions above, not from market research. If your team spends twenty minutes a day on the list rather than forty-five, halve it. The costing exists to show an order of magnitude and a method, not to settle the question.
The cost this sum does not yet include
So far we have priced time only. The other three costs are harder to count and usually larger.
- The calls that never happened. Forty-five minutes a day is, at ordinary pace, a dozen or more conversations nobody had. They appear in no report, because nothing records an absence.
- Dialling the same company twice. Without deduplication, last month’s company lands on this month’s list. That costs reputation as well as time — the person picking up remembers the previous call.
- The cost of switching. A morning spent clicking through maps is not the same activity as a sales conversation. Getting back into the mode where you sell has its own price.
The expensive part of a hand-built list is not the hours that went into building it. It is the conversations that did not happen because of it.
What changes when a system builds the list
Automation does not take this time to zero — somebody still has to decide which industry and which city today. What goes away is the mechanical work: the clicking, the retyping, and the manual watch for duplicates.
- List preparation per day
- 5 min
- Team time per month
- 7 h
- Monthly cost at 60 PLN/h
- 420 PLN
- Tool subscription (Starter plan)
- 99 PLN
On these assumptions the subscription pays for itself on the first day of the month. The second number matters more, though: fifty-six hours handed back to the team, available for conversations.
Measure it on your own team in a week
- For five days, ask the team for one figure a day: minutes spent preparing the list before the first call went out.
- Average it and put that in Costing A in place of forty-five minutes.
- Put your real hourly cost into Costing B — the loaded cost of the seat, not the gross rate.
- Compare the result with the price of any tool that shortens that time. If the difference comes out negative, change nothing.
That is the entire exercise. It needs no rollout and no deck — five numbers from your own team and ten minutes.