Moved from $45 a lead to $185 an appointment, revenue up 31%

Been selling motivated seller leads to six investors in two mid-size metros for about a year. Per-lead pricing was slowly killing me. $45 a lead, roughly 240 leads a month across the buyers, so about $10,800 gross, and then 15 to 20% of it came back as disputes. Every dispute was the same conversation: wrong number, tire kicker, already listed. I spent maybe six hours a week arguing about $45 items.

Switched in March. Now I don't sell leads at all, I sell booked appointments. My two setters work the raw flow, and a lead only becomes a billable item when the seller confirms a time and address with a text reply. $185 each.

April through August: raw lead flow stayed about the same, 31 to 39 billable appointments a month. Call it 34 average, so $6,290. Sounds worse until you add that disputes fell to under 3% and my setter cost was already sunk in the old model. Net to me went up about 31% and the six hours of arguing went to about forty minutes.

What nearly broke it: no-show gaming. Two buyers started reporting no-shows they hadn't attended themselves (one guy's acquisitions hire was skipping them and marking them no-show). I now require the claim within 24 hours with a note, and I re-call the seller. Sellers confirmed attendance on 11 of the first 14 disputed ones, which ended that. I credit a genuine no-show, one credit per, no cash refunds.

What I'd keep: billing on an event the seller has to confirm. That's the whole trick. The seller's own text is the invoice backup, so the argument stops being about lead quality and becomes about whether a thing happened.

Answer

1renee_dubois Get yours

harrow's asking the right thing and the answer decides whether this holds up past a year.

kestrel, you moved the billable event closer to the seller, which is good, and you also moved it away from anything correlated with money changing hands. An appointment is a calendar entry. Your incentive is now volume of calendar entries and your buyers' incentive is contracts, and those two only stay aligned while your setters are honest and your buyers are patient. So the thing to instrument is contract rate per buyer, monthly, and to show it to them unprompted. If buyer three is closing 1 in 22 and buyer one is closing 1 in 9, that's a coaching problem on their end, and you're the only one holding both numbers.

I'd also put a floor on what counts as billable beyond a confirmed time. Something like the seller stating a reason for selling and acknowledging the buyer pays cash and closes as-is. Two fields, captured in the setter's script, in the seller's words. That makes your appointment slightly harder to manufacture and much easier to defend.

On the no-show rule, one credit per is right, and I'd cap total credits per buyer per month so a bad hire on their side stops being your cost. Where I'd push back: 34 appointments across six buyers is under six each. That's thin enough that one buyer leaving takes 17% of revenue, and appointment pricing gives you no cushion the way volume lead sales did.

2 replies

4omar_haddadActivePRO11

$185 an appointment is fine until a buyer works out that a confirmed appointment with a seller wanting retail plus 10% is worth zero to him. What's stopping you from booking easy appointments with unmotivated people to hit 34 a month? I'd be watching for that if I were buying, because that's exactly where scope creep starts on my side of the business too.