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.
Defaults are published benchmarks for this audience segment (linked below) plus illustrative Sales Traveler figures — every field is editable. 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.
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.