I've written before on the topic of "Pay-per-Appointment" appointment setting (see When is pay-per-appointment a good fee model for appointment setting?) and I thought it would be worthwhile posting some thoughts here about how the current economic climate is affecting the risk/reward balance for results-based appointment setting.

Unsurprisingly, we're finding a significant increase in interest for pay-per-appointment setting in the current climate. After all, with tighter marketing budgets and a greater focus on return-on-investment surely it's the only way to go.

However, from an appointment setting agency's point of view, the current climate has made the job that much harder, so it's important to get the risk/reward balance right in terms of cost per appointment.

Setting up sales appointments has always been a tough game but in today's climate, where prospects have much less time and far less budget, it's even tougher. We're finding that, on average, strike-rates have almost doubled across various propositions.

(Our strike-rate is how often we convert a pitch to an appointment).

So, on the one hand you've got clients with less money and on the other you've got the fact that the actual job of appointment setting had got more difficult.

Just to make things more fun, clients today are understandably looking for much tighter qualification criteria for appointments. This is due to both truncated ROI expectations (the time it takes to get a return on your marketing spend) and the fact that a lot of clients have cut dead wood from their sales team so have to optimise their sales resource.

Less money, tighter qualification, tougher to get appointments - life's hard, eh?

So what's the right balance?

From a risk/reward perspective it's simple really - it's all down to the reward.

Or, as Tom Cruise once said, "Show me the money!"

In the current climate, when we turn down a pay-per-appointment gig (and we do, regularly) it's because it's just not worth our time.

However, if the risk/reward balance is right, then we're happy to take up the challenge.

What's the right price? Well we take a view on each opportunity but here's a guide to our thought processes.

If you went to a traditional day-rate telemarketing agency they're going to charge an average of £275 - £300 per day. They take no risk (you pay them even if they fail to book a single appointment for you).

So, if based on our experience we think we can book one appointment per day (just to keep the maths easy, for some client propositions this could be more like one appointment every three days) then we would like for a superior return for our time when compared to the average day rate. After all, we're taking all the risk, right?

Based on these numbers, something like £500 per qualified appointment would be attractive to us.
If the cost gets too close to a no-risk day rate then why would anyone bother?

So, inevitably, the question is just how much are you prepared to pay per qualified sales appointment?

Labels: appointment setting, pay-per-appointment