What does a small business sales stack cost?

The short answer

The cost of a sales stack is the subscriptions plus the time spent keeping the tools in step. A fair count has three numbers: how many subscriptions you pay for, how many logins you maintain, and how many hand-offs a customer goes through before they pay.

We do not quote a typical price for a stack here, because it depends on which tools you pick and which plan you are on, and prices change. The way to know your number is to add up your own, and the worksheet below does that.

Count your own: a three-column worksheet

Take a sheet of paper and list every tool that touches a customer before they pay. For each tool, write three things.

Subscription: the monthly price on your latest invoice, multiplied by twelve if it bills yearly. Login: yes or no, and add a tick if more than one person needs it. Hand-off: every time you copy, export or retype something between this tool and another.

Take a fictional example. A small agency uses a lead list, an email sequencer, a CRM, a scheduling link and an answering service. That is five subscriptions and five logins. A new lead moves from the list to the sequencer (hand-off one), from the sequencer to the CRM when they reply (two), from the scheduling link to the CRM when they book (three), and from the answering service to the CRM when they call (four). Four hand-offs for every customer, and four chances to forget one.

Putting a price on hand-offs

Hand-offs cost minutes, not dollars, so do the arithmetic in minutes. If each hand-off takes three minutes and you have four per customer, that is twelve minutes per customer. At 30 new customers a year, that is six hours a year. At 30 new leads a week, it is a much larger number, because the hand-offs apply to every lead, not only the ones who pay.

Change the figures to match your own. The point is that this cost scales with the number of leads you work, while a subscription price does not. A stack can look cheap on the invoice and still be expensive in your week.

What a single customer acquisition engine costs

Here are Rocketship's published plans. Each one covers the whole job: finding buyers, emailing from your own Gmail, following up, booking the meeting, answering your phone and taking the payment, on one record of every customer.

Launch and Frontier start with a 7-day free trial, card required. Mission Control has no trial. A dedicated phone line is $5 a month extra, and Launch includes none. Importing your own contacts is free; a lead is used when Rocketship starts working a contact, and finding new people uses enrichment credits. Extra leads can be topped up: $15 for 100, $35 for 300, $99 for 1,000 or $399 for 5,000.

Comparing the two

Once you have your worksheet, compare in the same three terms. How many subscriptions does the new setup replace? How many logins? How many hand-offs disappear because the steps share one record?

For which tools it can stand in for, see what one tool can replace. For how to cut the stack, see how to simplify your sales process. Every plan is on the pricing page.