In short: there are four realistic ways to cover lead follow-up – do it yourself, buy hours from a virtual assistant, employ someone, or hand the process to a managed service. At 30 enquiries a month the monthly cash cost ranges from nothing to around £1,500. The figure that decides it is not on that list: it is what the unanswered enquiries are worth.
Where these numbers come from
Two different kinds of figure appear on this page and it is worth separating them.
Market ranges for VAs, admin salaries and CRM licences are UK ranges as of 2026. They are ranges rather than prices because the market genuinely varies by region, experience and scope. Treat them as the band you should expect to be quoted within, and get an actual quote before deciding anything.
LoadOff’s own figures are current published pricing, taken from our pricing page rather than estimated. There are no contracts and cancellation is 30 days’ notice.
The volume we are costing
Comparing hourly rates against monthly retainers tells you nothing, so everything below is costed against the same business.
Thirty enquiries a month, average job worth £750. Those are the defaults on our own response time calculator and they describe a lot of small UK service businesses.
Doing follow-up properly on one enquiry means a first reply that answers something, logging it so it does not get lost, a chase on day three if nothing comes back, and a final one on day seven. Not every enquiry needs all four steps, because some convert and some decline. Averaged out that lands around fourteen minutes each, so:
30 enquiries × ~14 minutes ≈ 8 hours a month.
⚠️ That eight hours is a working estimate rather than a measured figure, and it excludes quoting, which stays with you under every option here. Substitute your own numbers if you have them. Everything below scales from it.
The comparison
| Option | Cash per month | Your time | Cover when someone is away |
|---|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself | £0 | ~8 hrs | None |
| CRM licence only | £7–£100 | ~8 hrs (unchanged) | None |
| Freelance VA, 8 hrs | £160–£280 | ~1 hr oversight | Usually none |
| Managed VA service | £299–£1,499 | ~1 hr | Usually included |
| Part-time admin hire | £417–£583 salary at 1 day/week, plus on-costs | Recruitment, training, management | Only if someone else can step in |
| LoadOff Lead Follow-Up | £499 | Minimal | Included |
Sources and workings for each row follow.
Doing it yourself
Free in cash terms, and the option most businesses are on.
The cost is eight hours of the person whose time is most expensive. At a £40 hourly chargeable rate that is £320 of work not done, which already puts it level with a VA.
The larger problem is not the hours, it is that they are the hours that get sacrificed. Follow-up has no deadline anybody notices. It loses to paid work every week, and it loses hardest in the weeks when there are most enquiries to follow up. That inconsistency is what the other options are really buying out.
The freelance virtual assistant
General admin support in the UK runs £15 to £35 an hour in 2026, most commonly quoted between £20 and £35. Senior or executive VAs charge £35 to £75.
At eight hours a month and the common band, that is £160 to £280 a month, which is the cheapest way to get the work off your desk.
Two things the headline rate does not include. Hours are usually worked in blocks, and enquiries do not arrive in blocks, so an enquiry landing Monday morning may wait until Wednesday’s session. And a freelancer is one person: if they are ill or on holiday, follow-up generally pauses.
Whether that matters is a capability question rather than a price one, and we go through it properly in a virtual assistant or a follow-up service.
The managed VA service
Agencies price monthly rather than hourly, typically £299 to £1,499 a month depending on hours included.
The wide band reflects genuinely different products. The bottom covers a few hours; the top is close to a part-time person. The advantage over a freelancer is usually cover, since an agency can put someone else on it. The disadvantage is that you may not get the same person twice, which matters more for work needing accumulated context than it does for follow-up.
Employing someone
A UK admin role runs roughly £25,000 to £35,000 a year full-time.
Here is the problem with putting it on this list: you cannot employ somebody for eight hours a month. The smallest realistic hire is about a day a week, which puts the salary at £5,000 to £7,000 a year, or £417 to £583 a month – and that is before employer National Insurance, pension contributions and the cost of recruiting.
⚠️ On-costs vary with thresholds and are worth checking with your accountant rather than taking from a web page.
So the honest reading of this row is that the comparison is wrong. If follow-up is the only job, employing someone means paying for a day a week and using an afternoon of it. An admin hire becomes the sensible option when there is enough other work – invoicing, scheduling, purchasing – to justify the role, and at that point follow-up rides along at close to no marginal cost. Then it is the cheapest option on this page by a distance.
The CRM line
Entry-tier CRM licences run £7 to £20 per user per month – HubSpot, Freshsales, monday, Pipedrive and Zoho all sit in that band. Mid-tier plans with automation and reporting are £25 to £50 per user per month.
For one or two users that is somewhere between £7 and £100 a month, which makes it look like the obvious answer.
It is on this table for completeness rather than as a real option, because a CRM does none of the eight hours. It stores the enquiries and reminds you about them, so the eight hours in the “your time” column does not move. If the reason leads are being lost is that nobody has twenty spare minutes on a Thursday, a licence does not supply them. That argument in full is on do you need a CRM, or someone to use the one you have.
What we charge, and what it does not cover
Lead Follow-Up is £499 a month. Enquiry capture and logging, an instant acknowledgement, a written reply from a person, the day-3 and day-7 chase sequence in your tone, outcome tracking and a weekly summary. No contract, 30 days’ notice.
Above that, Inbox & Ops at £899 adds daily inbox triage, quote and task chasing and appointment reminders, and Ops + Automation at £1,500 adds workflow builds and integrations.
What £499 does not cover: quoting, pricing, or anything requiring you to see the job. It does not answer your phone. It is one process run properly, not a person you can redirect at whatever this week needs – which is exactly the trade being made against a VA.
The number that changes the comparison
Every figure above sits between nothing and £1,500 a month. Here is the one that makes them all look similar.
At 30 enquiries a month and a £750 average job, recovering one extra job a month is £750. Recovering two is £1,500, which is more than the most expensive option on this page.
You do not need a big conversion improvement for that. Two enquiries a month that currently get answered on Thursday instead of Monday, or two quotes that nobody chases, is the whole difference. Our own response time calculator models the first-reply half of it against your own figures.
⚠️ That is a model, not a measurement, and it will be wrong for your business in one direction or the other. The point is the order of magnitude: the cost of the options differs by hundreds a month, and the cost of the leak is measured in jobs.
Where we are the wrong answer
Three cases, said plainly.
Very low volume. Under about ten enquiries a month, £499 is poor value and an hourly VA is the sensible answer.
Varied work. If what you need changes weekly, buy a person’s time rather than one process. A VA will serve you better.
High-value, low-volume work. A business quoting four £40,000 jobs a year does not have a follow-up process problem. It has four relationships, and they should be yours.
Before deciding anything
Every option here assumes the leak is where you think it is. It is worth checking, because the fix for a slow first reply is different from the fix for an unchased quote.
We will send one enquiry to your own address and time how long it takes to get a human answer – you write it, you approve the wording, and the result comes back about a week later. It costs nothing and it tells you which of the two problems you are buying a solution to.
LoadOff runs lead follow-up and inbox work for UK small businesses from £499 a month. No contracts, 30 days’ notice, most clients live within 48–72 hours. Get in touch for a straight answer on whether it fits your volume.
Related reading: A virtual assistant or a follow-up service? · Do you need a CRM, or someone to use it?