Pay per lead or pay per appointment?

The short version

Pay per lead suits installers with someone who can call a new enquiry within minutes and follow up properly. Pay per appointment suits installers whose team is on a roof all day and whose phone goes to voicemail at two in the afternoon.

That is genuinely the whole decision. Everything else is detail.

What pay per lead gives you

A verified enquiry hits your phone within seconds of clearing qualification. It is exclusive, it is yours, and what happens next is entirely down to your team.

The upside is control and unit cost. You get more contacts for the same spend, you decide who to prioritise, and you can work a lead that is three months out rather than discarding it. If your follow-up is genuinely good, this is the better model and it is not close.

The downside is that the model assumes the call happens. A lead that sits for a day is worth a fraction of the same lead called immediately, and you have already paid for it either way.

What pay per appointment gives you

We generate the enquiry, call it, qualify it against your criteria and book a site visit into your calendar. It arrives confirmed. You turn up and close the job.

The upside is that the highest-risk step in the whole chain, somebody actually calling the lead fast, is no longer sitting with a team that is busy installing. You are buying a slot in your diary rather than an opportunity to create one.

The downside is unit cost and control. Each appointment costs more than each lead, because the calling and qualifying is done for you. You also need to be disciplined about turning up, because a missed appointment burns the relationship with a buyer who was ready.

The maths that matters

Do not compare cost per lead against cost per appointment. Compare cost per install.

Take your close rate on leads you call within five minutes, and your close rate on leads you get to the next day. Then be honest about what share of leads your team actually calls inside five minutes. Most installers who run the numbers find their effective close rate is well below what they believe it is, because the average includes every lead that went cold waiting.

An appointment does not have that decay built into it. That is what you are paying the difference for.

Running both

Plenty of installers do. A common pattern is leads for the postcodes where they have a salesperson who lives nearby and can get there fast, and appointments for the outer regions where the drive makes speculative visits expensive.

Another is seasonal. Leads through the quieter months when the team has phone time, appointments through the summer rush when nobody does.

You are not locked into either. There is no contract and no retainer, so the mix can change month to month.

Which one to start with

If you have a dedicated person on the phone, start with leads. If your team is on the tools, start with appointments. If you are genuinely unsure, start with a small lead pack and measure how long it actually takes you to make the first call. That number will answer the question for you.