What will prospect warming cost in 2026? Real figures for Belgian B2B

The sum that comes up straight away: a cake for your prospect costs €160, a cold email costs a few cents. How can that math ever work out?

Honest answer: the math is not what you think. Per touch, gifting is expensive, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Per closed deal the gap in Belgium is smaller than you expect, certainly once you count founder time and reckon with the tax treatment.

This article works it through. No marketing spin, just Belgian figures, a tax distinction that gets explained wrong more often than right, and a fair comparison.

The Belgian CAC math, in one table

Say you are a SaaS company in Antwerp, ACV €15,000, 25 dream accounts in the pipeline. Here is the comparison for two outbound strategies. For ordinary cold email we use the median benchmark of 1.5% reply (Woodpecker 2025). For gifting we deliberately stay conservative with an assumption of 25% reply. Target: ±40% reply to a cake. That is not measured yet, so this sum sticks to the conservative assumption. The steps from reply to meeting to closed deal are assumptions too, so use your own conversion rates.

At first sight cold email wins. €500 to €1,163 CAC versus €2,667. A hopeless gap.

But these are the figures before three corrections that most sales teams forget to make.

Correction 1, founder time is not €0

An ordinary cold email campaign of 1,000 emails quickly takes 8 to 12 hours of founder or SDR time: building the list, writing the copy, setting up the sequence, handling replies by hand. That is an estimate, not a measurement, so count your own hours. At €40 per hour (an average founder rate, use your own rate) that is €320 to €480 extra. Add it in and divide by that 0.43 of a closed deal: ordinary cold email sits at €1,907 to €2,279 CAC, not €1,163. The top 10% variant lands around €610 to €660.

Gifting? Putting together 25 cakes through the configurator takes about half an hour. Replies come in by email or LinkedIn, as usual. No sequence maintenance, no deliverability monitoring. Total founder time: 1 hour. At €40 per hour that is €40 extra. Total: €4,040 / 1.5 closed = €2,693 CAC.

Correction 2, the tax treatment

This is where it gets interesting. Most Belgian sales teams book their gifting costs as a business gift. Business gifts are only 50% deductible, and the VAT is not deductible once the gift itself costs €50 excl. VAT or more. Give several gifts to the same relation in one calendar year and the tax authorities accept the VAT deduction on only one of them.

A cake of €160 incl. 6% VAT is roughly €150.94 excl. VAT plus roughly €9.06 VAT. Booked as a business gift:

• that €9.06 of VAT is not deductible and simply becomes part of the cost, so the books carry €160.00
• 50% of €160.00 = €80.00 deductible in corporate tax, which saves €20.00 of tax
• effective cost after tax: €140 (at a rate of 25%)

There is a second category: publicity and promotion costs. Those are 100% deductible and the VAT on them is deductible. The exception in the law is narrower than the phrase advertising element suggests. Article 53, 8° of the Belgian income tax code keeps 50% of the cost of business gifts out of the deduction, except for advertising items that conspicuously and lastingly carry the name of the giving company. The code has no official English version. The Dutch wording is opvallend en blijvend de benaming van de schenkende onderneming dragen, and the English above is our rendering of it. Those are three conditions from the statute itself: conspicuous, lasting, and the name of whoever gives the gift. The administration and the advisers add two more: the item has to be of small value and meant for very wide distribution, not reserved for a limited category of clients or business relations (circular no. 32 of 29 May 2017). Five conditions, and they have to hold together.

Hold a ColdCake against those five conditions:

• conspicuous: your brand and your design sit in edible ink on the cake itself, no insert, no separate card beside it, plus a QR code that brings the cake to life in AR with your video and leads to a personal page. A cake clears this condition easily
• the name of the giving company: you send the cake and your name is on it, so this condition is fine as well
• lasting: this is where it breaks down. A cake gets eaten. What was printed on it is gone by the time the coffee is finished, and lasting is exactly the word the law uses
• small value: €160 apiece is not that, and small value is exactly the term the administration uses
• very wide distribution: 25 carefully chosen dream accounts are the opposite of that. They are a limited category of clients, which is what the condition rules out

A cake meets two of the five conditions and misses three. They have to hold together, so the 100% route is shut here.

A spend that does meet all five, a pen with your logo or a printed notebook you hand out by the hundred at a trade fair, works out differently. At €160 apiece you do not get there, so the sum below is here only to show the gap between the two categories:

• 100% of €150.94 deductible
• VAT of roughly €9.06 deductible
• effective cost after tax: roughly €113 (at a rate of 25%, at 20% it is slightly higher)

Between those two categories sits €26.80 per cake, and over 25 cakes €670 across the whole campaign. That gap is not a dial you turn yourself: the nature of the spend decides the account, not the word you type on the invoice. Advisers treat consumables such as wine and chocolate as business gifts for that reason, and a cake is of the same kind. So plan for the 50% route. The background to the distinction is set out at Boekhouder123 on the cost of gifts.

For VAT there is a separate road your accountant can weigh, the trade sample. Circular no. 32 of 29 May 2017 asks three things at once: you hand it out for advertising reasons, the cost is accepted as a business expense for direct taxes, and the sample is of the same kind as what you make or sell yourself. Clear that and the VAT stays deductible and the €50 threshold does not apply. Note what that does and does not do: it is a VAT rule, and it changes nothing about the 50% on the income tax side. If you do not sell pastry yourself that is probably not your road, but asking costs nothing.

Important: this is not tax advice. Whether your campaign can be booked as a publicity cost depends on your concrete situation and on the assessment by the tax authorities. Always put it to your accountant before you book it that way.

Correction 3, lifetime value and warmth

The CAC table above looks only at the first deal. For B2B that is misleading.

A prospect who replies to your cold email liked you just enough to say "yes, fine, 15 minutes then". A prospect who replies to a cake carrying your design, a cake the colleagues have seen, that reception talks about, that someone drops a photo of in the group chat, has a fundamentally different relationship with your brand from day 1.

We have no multi-year data of our own to prove this: ColdCake was prepared in 2025 and launched in 2026. But Sendoso data from the US shows that customers who come in through gifting have 40% lower churn in year 1 than cold email customers, and that their ACV grows 23% faster on average (Sendoso). Research by Belkins sees similar patterns.

Take a conservative 20% difference in LTV, at an average ACV of €15,000, and a customer won through gifting is worth €9,000 more over 3 years than a customer won through cold email. That figure does not belong in a CAC table, but it weighs heavier than what does.

What happens after the box opens

Where does that warmth come from? Partly from the minute after the box opens, and that is where the AR sits. AR stands for augmented reality: a digital image laid over what your phone camera sees. Whoever scans the QR code on the cake sees the cake come to life on their phone, with your video, and no app is needed. If a colleague is looking over their shoulder, they see it too, and one button saves or shares the video. In this calculation that moment is not a cost but a signal: ColdCake keeps track of whether the cake was scanned, and tells you if you ask. Then you call someone who has already scanned it. The full sequence: what your prospect sees after the scan.

The corrected table

Everything rounded and based on the assumptions above. The method: all costs after corporate tax at 25%. Tooling, salaries and founder time are ordinary, fully deductible business expenses. For the cakes we run both bookings, with the effective costs from correction 2: €140 per cake as a business gift, €113.20 per cake as a publicity cost. Everything divided by the closed deals from the first table. We deliberately leave LTV out here, it does not belong in a CAC sum.

Run it yourself. Ordinary cold email: €500 tooling plus €320 to €480 of time is €820 to €980, after the 25% tax benefit €615 to €735 is left, divided by that 0.43 of a closed deal is €1,430 to €1,709, midpoint ±€1,570. Top 10%: €1,820 to €1,980, after the benefit €1,365 to €1,485, divided by 3 is €455 to €495. Gifting as a business gift: 25 x €140 = €3,500, plus €30 of founder time after the benefit, is €3,530, divided by 1.5 closed deals is €2,353, rounded to ±€2,350. As a publicity cost it would be 25 x €113.20 = €2,830, plus €30, is €2,860, divided by 1.5 is €1,907, rounded to ±€1,900.

Still more expensive than cold email, even after every correction. On the business gift route the gap with ordinary cold email is roughly €780 per closed deal, no longer a multiple. If the spend did meet all five conditions that would drop to roughly €340, but at €160 per cake that does not happen. And that top 10% needs a team of several SDRs plus a serious tooling stack, which most Belgian B2B companies do not have.

Set the LTV side next to that: counted conservatively, a customer won through gifting is worth €9,000 more over 3 years. Against a CAC gap of €780 that is not a detail.

The honest conclusion stands: per touch, gifting is by far the most expensive. Per closed deal it comes closer than the first table suggests, and on what the relationship is worth after the deal, it wins. That last part just fits nowhere in a CAC table.

The practical decision rule

Use gifting for dream accounts (tier 1, your top 20 to 50 accounts per year). Use cold email for volume plays (tier 3). Combine in tier 2: cold email as the opener, a cake as the follow-up after a non-response.

Our Eerste Oven plan (€825 per month for 5 rectangular cakes, €100 less than the same cakes ordered separately) suits a team that wants to work 25 to 50 dream accounts per quarter. Volle Bak (€1,750 per month for 10 rectangular cakes, €300 less than ordered separately) if you have a larger ICP. Plan for both to be treated as business gifts, and put the question of whether your spend sits differently to your accountant before you order.

For single one-shots our cakes start at €160 (M, round), prices incl. 6% VAT and delivery in Flanders and Brussels included. Your cake can be on your prospect’s desk in 48 hours. One good deal is all you need to earn this back.

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The tax information in this article is based on standard Belgian rules as of 2026 and is not tax advice. For your specific situation, consult your accountant. Questions about how ColdCake's invoicing works? Write to us at info@coldcake.be.