Pay per appointment vs pay per lead for financial advisers

A bought lead means ringing, leaving voicemails, texting and emailing, and sometimes finding you're the fifth firm to call. The lead isn't always bad. The problem is that the best part of it can be gone by the time you get to it. That's why InvestmentsBooked charges per show rather than per lead.

There are firms for whom leads are the better buy, and we'll say which. This post puts numbers on the three things that decide it: how fast you respond, how much your chasing time costs, and whether the "appointment" you're offered is one where anyone actually turns up.

What's the difference between a lead and an appointment?

A lead is a person who has asked to be contacted. An appointment is a person who has agreed a time. Between those two sits all the work: the first call, the voicemails, the qualifying questions, finding a slot, sending the invite. Who does that work, and who pays when it fails, is what separates the models.

Prices as published on 27 September 2026, ex VAT unless the supplier says "no VAT". Full breakdown in what financial adviser leads cost.

"Pre-booked appointments" and "qualified appointments" are marketing phrases with no fixed definition. One supplier's qualified appointment is a phone number and a time; another's is a recorded qualification call and a pot floor. The table only works once you've read the terms behind the words.

How fast do you need to call a new enquiry?

Faster than most advisers can manage while also advising clients. Unbiased published its own figure in The quick response advantage (last updated 11 November 2024): firms that contact leads the same day "are likely to get an 80% lead to first appointment rate. For those who wait 24 hours, it reduces to 25%." It attributes that to conversations with its biggest and best-performing advisory firms, so treat it as practitioner experience rather than a controlled study. Still, it's the platform's own number, and it lines up with older US research: a 2011 Harvard Business Review audit of 2,241 US companies found firms that responded within an hour were about seven times more likely to qualify a lead than those that waited even an hour longer.

Here's what that does to the price you pay. Take ten Unbiased enquiries at £193 each (the £250k–£500k wealth band), £1,930 in total:

Illustrative, using Unbiased's published rates and enquiry price, ex VAT and before subscription. Unbiased's figure is lead to first appointment; it doesn't say how many of those appointments were attended.

Same enquiries, same price, and the cost per appointment more than triples because of a day's delay. Those are appointments booked, not meetings attended. If one in five then doesn't turn up (an assumption, for illustration), £241 becomes about £301 per attended meeting and £772 becomes about £965. That's the whole argument for and against leads in one sum. If you can reliably call within the hour, leads can be good value. If a lead arrives while you're in a two-hour review meeting and you get to it at five o'clock, you're somewhere between the two tiles. If it sits until tomorrow, you've paid more per booked appointment than many appointment sellers charge, and you still carry the no-show risk.

Unbiased's help centre now suggests responding within an hour of accepting an enquiry, ideally within 15 minutes, and it has added an auto-accept tool for evenings and weekends. Both tell you how much the race matters.

What does chasing leads cost in your time?

More than it feels like, because it arrives in five-minute pieces. Unbiased's best-practice cadence for each lead runs like this:

• Day 1: automated welcome, a call and voicemail, an email and a text.
• Day 2: call and text.
• Day 4: call and email.
• Day 6: call and text.
• Day 10: a final call, then into a longer nurture sequence.

That's five calls, three texts and two emails per lead before you've spoken to anyone, which is sensible advice. It's also a lot of admin. Add a qualifying conversation when someone answers, the back-and-forth to find a slot, and a CRM note each time, and 45–60 minutes per lead is a fair working estimate. That estimate is ours, not a survey figure, so swap in your own.

Illustrative. The time per lead is an estimate and the hourly values are examples. If a team member does the chasing, use their cost instead of yours.

Put that on top of a £193 enquiry that reaches a meeting half the time (£386 per attended meeting) and you're at roughly £536–£686 per attended meeting once time is counted. That's why US research on adviser marketing keeps finding that time is most of the bill: the Kitces 2022 marketing study put adviser time at nearly 70% of the average cost of winning a client.

There's a less visible cost too. Every hour on the phone chasing is an hour not spent with a client who already pays you. Advisers are busier than they were: NextWealth's 2026 benchmarks found 49% personally serve more clients than a year earlier.

Why do good advisers turn down most enquiries?

Often because capacity runs out before lead supply does. The clearest public example we've seen is from adviser Phil Anderson, who posted his Unbiased numbers on LinkedIn in October 2024. Over 90 days his firm accepted 80 of 772 available leads, about one in ten. It spent £13,086 (around £164 per accepted lead) and reported a £52,904 return. He said speed of response mattered and that the team wasn't big enough to buy more.

That's a single self-reported case, and the post doesn't say whether the £52,904 is fees, revenue or something else, so don't read it as a benchmark. What it does show is the shape of good lead buying:

• They pick hard. Nine in ten available enquiries were passed over.
• They move fast on the ones they take.
• They hit a people limit before they hit a lead limit. More supply wouldn't have helped without more staff.

For a firm like that, the more useful question is where the team's hours should go. If the answer is advising rather than chasing, appointments free up the hours. If the firm has spare administrative capacity and a sharp follow-up routine, leads keep more of the margin.

The same thinking should shape any appointment product you buy. You want to be able to say no in advance: set a minimum pot band, the regions and meeting types you'll take, how many a week you can handle, and pause when the diary's full. Those are the controls firms set on InvestmentsBooked, and they're worth asking any supplier for. If you set a higher minimum (£500k or £1m) and the prospect confirms pensions below the band you selected, the show is credited, even if they hold £250k or more.

Why are booked and attended appointments different products?

Because a booking is a promise and an attendance is a fact. If you pay on booking, every no-show is money gone plus a slot in your diary you blocked out and prepared for. The sum to compare them is:

Cost per attended meeting = price per booked appointment ÷ share of bookings that attend

• Lead Pronto publishes booked pension appointments from £130 and says 82% attend. £130 ÷ 0.82 = about £159 per attended meeting on its own figure, with no stated pot floor.
• A £300 booked appointment at 70% attendance works out at about £429 per attended meeting. At 80% it's £375. (A hypothetical, to show the scale of the effect.)
• Pay per show sets the attendance side of the sum to 100% on your bill, because the ones who don't turn up aren't charged.

Terms matter as much as the headline. GAP GNX's July 2026 terms define an appointment as agreeing a time to speak and offer replacement or credit for failed qualification, but don't promise a no-show credit. RMT Direct's Pro Advisor appointments start from £180, and a formal no-show term isn't published. ADsorbed says it charges only when the meeting sits. None of that makes one supplier better. It means the words "pay per appointment" on their own tell you very little.

There's history here too. VouchedFor charged advisers per meeting back in 2013, at £79–£299, and advisers complained about how meetings were counted and charged. The lesson we take from it: if you're paid per meeting, you have to publish exactly what counts as one. We publish ours as a show test, with a 72-hour window to flag a disqualification.

What should a qualified appointment include?

A good qualified appointment answers the questions you'd otherwise spend the first 15 minutes of the meeting asking. In a forum poll that adviser-marketing trainer Philip Calvert described on his podcast, "something like 95–98%" of advisers said they almost always need more information before deciding whether a new lead is workable. Before you buy from anyone, ask them these ten questions, and get the answers in writing:

1. What exactly triggers the charge: the booking, the prospect joining, or a conversation of a minimum length?
2. Do video, phone and face-to-face meetings all count, and what happens if the technology fails?
3. How is the pot size captured, and what happens if it turns out lower on the call? How long do I have to dispute it?
4. Are defined benefit transfer seekers, people who want free guidance only, or people who won't pay any fee excluded?
5. What are the cancellation and rebooking rules?
6. Where do prospects come from, who approved the adverts, and what did the prospect consent to? Has anyone phoned them unsolicited?
7. Is each appointment sold to one firm only, and is that in the contract?
8. Is the price plus VAT?
9. Can you show a recent cohort from booked to attended to paying client?
10. Will you give me an introducer due-diligence pack: lead sources, example approved adverts, the consent wording, data-sharing terms and your complaints process?

Question six is the one compliance will ask about. Unsolicited pension marketing calls are banned under PECR regulation 21B except in narrow cases, and the FCA's July 2026 update reminds advisers they stay responsible for business they accept from unauthorised introducers. For what it's worth, our answers to all ten are on lead quality and pricing, and we share our due-diligence pack during onboarding. For question nine, we don't publish adviser cohort results, so weigh that gap as you would with any supplier.

When are leads the better buy?

Leads are likely the better buy if most of these are true:

• Someone in the firm can call every new enquiry within the hour, every working day.
• You already run a follow-up cadence and track contact, meeting and conversion rates by source.
• Your minimums are below £250k, so the cheaper, lower-floor tiers still fit your book.
• You're happy to trade adviser or administrator time for a lower cash price.

Under those conditions the numbers can favour leads. An Unbiased £250k–£500k enquiry at £193 that reaches an attended meeting two times in three costs about £288 per meeting, well under £500, before subscription and time. A fast firm can make that work. Referrals are cheaper still, when they come, which is why they're still the main source of new clients for most firms (56% in NextWealth's 2026 survey, down from 67% the year before).

Appointments make more sense when your time is the scarce resource, when you only want larger pots, or when you've tried leads and found the same-day race doesn't fit a diary full of client meetings.

So which should you buy?

Run your own numbers rather than taking ours. Take last quarter's leads from one source, count how many reached an attended meeting, add up the cash and a fair value for the hours, and divide. Then compare that with the price per attended meeting from any appointment supplier, on the same VAT basis. The lead cost calculator does the arithmetic if you give it your rates, and client acquisition cost takes it through to payback.

For transparency: InvestmentsBooked sells attended first meetings with people who have self-declared £250k+ in defined contribution pensions and reconfirm it on the call. The prospect answers the qualifier online, picks a time and confirms their mobile. The prospect asks us to book them with one FCA-authorised independent firm. We share their answers with that one firm only, and we tell them the firm's name and FRN as soon as it claims the booking, before the call. You claim the appointment and receive their brief before the meeting. We don't make unsolicited pension marketing calls. The price is £500 per qualified show, no VAT added, and no-shows are credited back to your balance. It's one option among several. See how it works for the full flow, or appointment types for the kinds of meeting we book.

Figures checked 27 September 2026. Sources: Unbiased, The quick response advantage (last updated 11 Nov 2024) and best-practice cadence; Unbiased enquiry prices (ex VAT); Harvard Business Review, March 2011 (US); Kitces Research 2022 (US); Phil Anderson on LinkedIn (3 Oct 2024, self-reported); Lead Pronto; RMT Direct; GAP GNX terms (2 Jul 2026); ADsorbed; Money Marketing, 21 Feb 2013; NextWealth Financial Advice Business Benchmarks 2026 via NextWealth and Money Marketing; FCA. Philip Calvert podcast (forum poll, as he described it). Time-per-lead and hourly values are estimates, labelled illustrative. InvestmentsBooked is not authorised by the FCA and does not give financial advice.

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