Calculating cost per qualified call comes down to one honest formula: total spend divided by the number of calls that actually met your qualification bar — with labor, software, and ad spend all counted, since labor alone can make up 43% of operating costs (per benchmark call center data). Then compare that number to your break-even: customer value multiplied by your call-to-customer rate. That's how you turn a vanity metric into a scaling guardrail. And skip cross-industry averages — they range from a couple of dollars to hundreds and tell you almost nothing about your business. Where AI SDRs change the math is speed and coverage: answering every inquiry in under 60 seconds, around the clock, recovers demand that slow follow-up quietly loses. That's the approach Worqd builds into every growth plan — one partner handling the whole path from first click to booked call. Your next step: pull last month's spend, define "qualified" precisely, and run the numbers. If the gap between your actual and break-even cost per call is wider than you'd like, book a free growth call and we'll find the bottleneck together.