Held vs booked: the word that doubles your cost
Two agencies quote you $500 a meeting. One bills when the meeting is booked, the other when it is held. Those are not the same price. Depending on the show rate, they are not even close.
The arithmetic
A booked meeting only has value if someone turns up. So the real question is never the quoted price, it is the quoted price divided by the show rate:
real cost per meeting = booked price ÷ show rate
Cold-sourced meetings commonly show at 60–75%. Here is what that does to three typical booked-meeting prices:
| Show rate | $200 booked | $350 booked | $500 booked |
|---|---|---|---|
| 90% | $222 | $389 | $556 |
| 80% | $250 | $438 | $625 |
| 70% | $286 | $500 | $714 |
| 60% | $333 | $583 | $833 |
| 50% | $400 | $700 | $1,000 |
| 40% | $500 | $875 | $1,250 |
At a 60% show rate, the $500 quote is really $833. At 50% it is $1,000. Nothing about the agency's price sheet changed. The only thing that changed is who absorbs the no-shows.
Why the incentive matters more than the price
The cost difference is the visible half. The invisible half is what each model rewards.
When an agency is paid on booked meetings, a no-show is free to them and expensive to you. Everything that inflates bookings and depresses attendance becomes rational: pushing for a slot before the prospect is genuinely interested, booking someone who was mildly curious, letting a soft yes onto the calendar because it bills either way. None of that requires bad faith. The model simply does not punish it.
When the agency is paid on held meetings, every no-show comes out of their margin. Qualification stops being something you have to police and starts being something they are financially motivated to do properly. That is the whole argument for the model, and it is why we use it.
Ask these four before you sign
- 1. Booked or held? Ask it in those words and get the answer in writing. It is the single highest-leverage question in the entire contract.
- 2. What is your show rate? An agency that bills on held meetings tracks this obsessively, because it is their own margin. One that bills on booked may genuinely not know.
- 3. What exactly qualifies? ICP criteria, a minimum attendance threshold, and who decides. If the definition lives in the proposal rather than the contract, it can move.
- 4. How do I dispute one? There should be a stated window, a stated process, and a stated outcome. "We'll work it out" is not a dispute process.
These are four of the six on our vetting checklist, which covers the rest of the contract and includes our own answers.
Where we land
We bill $250 per held qualified meeting. A no-show never bills, a cancellation never bills, and a rebooked meeting bills once and only if it happens. There is no show-rate calculation to do, because the number on the invoice and the number of meetings that occurred are the same number.
The definition lives in the contract, every booking appears in your portal the day it is made with its evidence, and you have three business days to dispute any entry. Full terms are on the pricing page, including what the infrastructure costs and what happens if you leave.
Common questions
What is the difference between a booked meeting and a held meeting?+
A booked meeting is one that got onto the calendar. A held meeting is one the prospect actually attended. The gap between them is the no-show rate, and in cold outbound it is routinely 30-40%. If you are billed per booked meeting, you pay for the no-shows too.
What is a normal show rate for cold outbound meetings?+
Commonly 60-75% for cold-sourced meetings, lower for junior-sourced or heavily incentivised booking. Warm and inbound meetings run higher. Any agency quoting a booked-meeting price should be able to tell you their show rate; if they cannot or will not, assume it is below 60%.
How do I calculate the real cost per meeting?+
Divide the booked price by the show rate. A $500 booked meeting at a 60% show rate costs $833 for each meeting that actually happens. At a 50% show rate it is $1,000. The advertised number and the real number are different numbers whenever billing is on booked.
Does paying per held meeting fix the incentive problem?+
It fixes the biggest one. When a no-show costs the agency rather than you, nobody benefits from stuffing the calendar with prospects who were never going to show up. It does not remove the need for a written definition of what qualifies, which is the second thing to nail down.
What should be in the definition of a qualified meeting?+
Four things, in the contract rather than the proposal: the ICP criteria the prospect must match, a minimum attendance threshold, a dispute window with a stated number of days, and explicit confirmation that no-shows and cancellations never bill. If any of the four is missing, the definition can move after you sign.
Want meetings you only pay for when they happen?
30 minutes. We'll tell you honestly whether your offer will work on cold email — even if the answer is no.