Cost per held meeting: the unit price of outbound

Outbound options are hard to compare because they price differently. Salaries, retainers, per-meeting fees, platform subscriptions. The way through the noise is to force everything into one unit: total monthly cost divided by held, qualified meetings. Not booked. Held, and accepted by the closer who took it.

Running the math on the common options

In-house. A fully loaded US SDR runs roughly $10,000 a month once salary, benefits, tooling, management time, and ramp are counted, the stack we priced in January. Against a typical held-meeting output, that lands near $475 per held meeting, and that is before turnover resets the ramp clock.

Premium agencies. Retainers in the $8,000 to $15,000 range with pooled reps tend to land at $630 or more per held meeting once you count only the meetings your AEs accept.

Pay-per-meeting vendors. Often the cheapest sticker, sometimes near $263 per meeting. Read the incentive before you celebrate. A vendor paid per booking is paid for calendar events, and unless the contract counts only held, accepted meetings, volume finds a way. The definition does all the work here.

Our model, shown. A CommandVA rep is $3,499 a month, published on the pricing page. Across the held-meeting range a disciplined rep typically produces, that works out to roughly $292 to $437 per held meeting on the monthly fee. We will not promise you a meeting count, and you should distrust anyone who does, but the math is yours to run and we publish every input.

Two rules for using this number

First, use the same denominator everywhere. If you count in-house meetings generously and vendor meetings strictly, the comparison is theater. The AE-accepted rate from your weekly report is the honest denominator.

Second, remember what the number leaves out. Cost per held meeting says nothing about meeting quality drift, contract lock-in, or what happens when a rep quits mid-quarter. Cheap meetings that never advance are expensive. The unit price is where the comparison starts, not where it ends.

The full model, with every line item visible, lives on our math page. If you want it run against your actual numbers, book a strategy call and bring last quarter's funnel. Thirty minutes, no deck.