Three Pricing Models, Not Two: Leads, Booked Appointments, and Shown Appointments

You will be quoted three kinds of thing in this market, and only two of them usually get talked about.

A lead is a contact record. A booked appointment is a calendar entry. A shown appointment is a person who turned up. Three products, three prices, and the gap between the second and the third is where most of the disappointment in this industry lives.

Start with the one nobody explains

If a company offers you twenty five appointments for a flat price, your first question is not what it costs. It is whether those are booked or shown.

A booked appointment is delivered the moment someone picks a time. Whether they remember, whether they answer, whether they had any intention of being there, none of that affects whether the vendor has done their job and invoiced you.

A shown appointment is only delivered when a person is in front of you.

Those two products can be priced four or five times apart and both be described as "appointments" on a landing page. If you compare a booked price to a shown price and pick the cheaper one, you have not found a bargain, you have bought a different thing.

Ask it plainly: is that number booked or shown. Then ask what happens when somebody does not turn up. The answer tells you which product you are being sold more reliably than anything on their website.

Who carries the risk

That is the whole difference between these three models, and it is worth being blunt about it.

With leads, you carry everything. Dialing, no answers, dead numbers, people who forgot filling in a form, and the fact that the same record may have been sold to several other producers. The vendor was paid when the form was submitted.

With booked appointments, the vendor carries the cost of getting someone to agree to a meeting. You carry the risk of whether it happens.

With shown appointments, the vendor carries both. If nobody turns up, they have spent the advertising money, the setter's time and the booking, and earned nothing.

None of these is nobler than the others. They are different allocations of the same risk, and the price reflects who is holding it.

The only number that matters

Cost per unit tells you almost nothing. Cost per written case tells you everything.

Work out how many of whatever you are buying it takes you to produce one application, then multiply by the unit price. Do it with your own close rate, not an average from a blog post.

Here is the shape of it, using round numbers so you can swap in yours. If twenty shared leads produce roughly a dozen conversations, those conversations produce a handful of bookings, and some of those bookings turn up, you can work backwards to what each meeting actually cost you.

Do the same for a shown appointment, where the only variable left is your close rate.

Most producers have never run this calculation, which is exactly why a thirty dollar lead keeps looking like a better deal than a thousand dollar meeting. Run it once with honest numbers and the comparison usually looks very different from how it looks on the invoice.

What the invoice does not show

The lead model has a cost that never appears on any statement, which is your week.

If working leads properly takes eight or ten hours of dialing, texting and rescheduling, and you are a producer whose hours are worth something in front of clients, then those hours belong in the calculation. Not because dialing is beneath anyone, but because it is the one task you cannot do while you are in a meeting.

This is why the same two options genuinely favour different people. A producer with a setter on staff is comparing invoices. A solo producer is comparing invoices plus a week.

Paying per show does not fix quality

Worth saying, because it is the part a vendor selling shown appointments has no incentive to tell you.

Someone can turn up on time, be perfectly pleasant, and have forty thousand dollars in a savings account. They showed. You pay.

Attendance and suitability are two separate problems, solved by two separate things. Paying on attendance fixes the empty calendar slot. Only the filter fixes who is sitting in it. That is why "what are your criteria, and what happens to the people who fail them" matters at least as much as the pricing model.

Which one fits you

Leads make sense if you have the staff or the stomach to work them, if you want control over every step, and if your average case is small enough that a per meeting premium is hard to justify.

Shown appointments make sense if you close well in the room and badly on the phone, if your average case is large enough that one extra written case pays for months of appointments, and if your bottleneck is time rather than budget.

If your bottleneck is budget, buy leads. If your bottleneck is hours, buy shown appointments. If someone is selling you booked appointments at a shown appointment price, buy neither.

The bottom line

A lead is raw material. A booked appointment is an intention. A shown appointment is a meeting.

We sell the third one. You are billed when a qualified retiree turns up, and when they do not, you are not billed at all, because we are the ones who paid to produce them.

That is not a favour. It is the only arrangement where our incentive and yours point in the same direction.