Impressions are cheap. Qualified attention isn't.
Ad platforms sell impressions, a scroll-past by someone who may not be your buyer. What you're buying is a qualified engaged touch and, ultimately, a qualified lead. This calculator prices both, three ways, using published 2025–26 benchmarks for reaching this exact audience: tech sales professionals and tech sales leadership, the most expensive seniority band on every ad platform.
Price the touch. Then price the lead.
Every default here is an ASSUMPTION, not a published benchmark, and each one is listed with its basis under the form. Replace them with your own account’s numbers, because you have the real CPM and the real cost per lead in your ad platform and this only means something measured against those. Results appear when you calculate.
The Sales Traveler partnership (read rate and response rate are industry-standard defaults; audience figure illustrative, the media kit carries real counts)
LinkedIn Ads path, reaching sales/revenue decision-makers
Tech is a high-competition category: CPMs run $50–100 against the $63 U.S. all-industry average, and senior sales titles (VP Sales, CRO, Head of Sales) carry a 40–60% premium on top of the $125 Software/IT cost per lead. Feed CTR ~0.5%; half of tightly-targeted impressions still land off-persona.
Google Ads path
Competitive software verticals run $8–15 CPCs against the $2–10 B2B range, with cost per lead spanning $70–200 (WordStream). Search reaches only whoever is searching this quarter.
Calculating files your inputs and results (anonymously, email optional below) with The Sales Traveler research desk. The email button opens a prefilled message to our partner desk; nothing sends from it until you hit send in your own mail client.
Where every one of these numbers came from
This page used to say its defaults were published benchmarks with the sources linked below. They were not, and there was nothing below. Here is the actual provenance of all 12. Seven have no source recorded and nobody has searched for one, which is stated as exactly that rather than dressed up as research. Three are illustrative figures about this desk that this desk cannot measure without the identifier-level tracking its own automation doctrine forbids. One is a fact: the price.
The comparison is only as good as what you put in it. If you have run a campaign to this audience, your own CPM and cost per lead beat every figure on this page, and the calculator is built to be overwritten.
| Input | Default | Status | Replace it with |
|---|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn CPM ($) Carried on the page since July 2026. Within the range practitioners report for LinkedIn ads targeted at senior professional titles, but that range is trade knowledge, not a figure LinkedIn publishes. | 85 | Assumption, unsourced | Your own LinkedIn Campaign Manager reporting for the audience you actually target. |
| LinkedIn engagement / CTR (%) Carried on the page since July 2026. | 0.5 | Assumption, unsourced | The CTR your own campaigns achieved on this audience. |
| Off-persona impressions (%) An assumption about targeting waste, not a measurement. It is the single most consequential input on the page: it divides the platform's effective reach, so it drives the comparison more than price does. | 50 | Assumption, unsourced | Your own view of how much of your delivered audience matches your buyer. If you do not know, set it to 0 and see whether the case still holds. |
| LinkedIn cost per lead, senior tech-sales titles ($) Carried on the page since July 2026. Cost per lead depends on the offer, the form and the definition of a lead, so a cross-industry average is a weak guide to any single campaign even where one is published. | 190 | Assumption, unsourced | Your own cost per lead, at your own definition of a lead. |
| Google CPC ($) Carried on the page since July 2026. | 10 | Assumption, unsourced | Your own Google Ads cost per click for the keywords you would actually buy. |
| Google clicks truly in-persona (%) An assumption, on the same footing as off-persona impressions. | 50 | Assumption, unsourced | Your own qualification rate on paid search clicks. |
| Google cost per lead, software B2B ($) Carried on the page since July 2026. | 100 | Assumption, unsourced | Your own paid-search cost per lead. |
| Engaged audience per send AN ILLUSTRATIVE FIGURE, NOT THIS SITE'S AUDIENCE. The desk's own first-party measurement is published at /data/traffic-signals/ and is a count of browser-shaped requests, which is not a newsletter audience and is not claimed as one. This field exists so a buyer can model a send of a given size; it is not a representation about reach. | 5000 | Illustrative | The audience size quoted to you in writing before you buy anything. |
| Read rate per send (%) Illustrative. Open tracking requires a tracking pixel, and build/AUTOMATION-DOCTRINE.md forbids the identifier-level collection that would make a read rate measurable here. | 45 | Illustrative | A read rate the desk will warrant in writing, or nothing. |
| Sponsored touches per month What a Brand Partnership month includes, as stated on /partner/. It is a term of the offer rather than an estimate of anything, which is why it sits beside the price and not beside the assumptions. | 4 | Published price | Nothing. It is what the tier includes. |
| Reader response rate per month (%) Illustrative, and already labelled as such on the page. It drives every cost-per-lead figure in the result. | 1 | Illustrative | Your own historical response rate on comparable placements. |
| Brand Partnership monthly ($) The published rate card price. This is the one number on the page that is a fact rather than an assumption: it is what the desk charges, stated at /partner/. | 12800 | Published price | Nothing. It is the price. |
Ruled 2026-09-08. Machine-readable at /data/ad-benchmarks.json.
Why the gap is structural, not a discount
An ad platform charges you three times for the same uncertainty: a premium CPM for professional context, a 40–60% surcharge to guess at seniority, and then the waste, half the impressions land off-persona, and 99.5% of the rest scroll past. A niche publication inverts the model. The audience self-selects, so persona match is built in. The read rate is 45%, not 0.5%, because your message sits inside content the reader came for. And the touch happens at the decision moment, someone reading "Is this sales trip worth it?" is minutes from spending. Benchmarks for reaching tech sales and sales leadership: B2B House (Software/IT CPL $125, from $1M managed spend), NAV43 (SaaS/tech CPLs routinely above $100; 1,240 campaigns), Stackmatix (C-suite targeting +40–60% CPL; enterprise $150–250), ZenABM (US CPM $62.67), Swydo/WordStream (Google B2B CPL $70). And the one thing no ad budget can buy here: the verdict stays ours, which is exactly why the adjacency converts.
Not the instrument you needed?
This page is the Audience Reach Cost Calculator, and it is distinct from the Hotel F&B Revenue Leakage Calculator. If that is the question in front of you, use Hotel F&B Revenue Leakage Calculator instead.