Put the meeting definition in the contract

Every disappointed outbound engagement we have ever heard about on a strategy call traces back to the same root: two parties who used the word "meeting" for months without ever agreeing what it meant. The provider counted calendar events. The client counted opportunities. Both were right by their own definition, which is the problem with private definitions.

The three clauses

The bar. A qualified meeting is with a company matching the written profile, with a person in a buying role, who expressed a real problem or timeline. Each of those phrases gets specified: which segments, which titles, what counts as expressed. "Agreed to a call" appears nowhere in the definition, because agreeing to a call is a calendar event, not a meeting.

The judge. The AE who takes the meeting marks it accepted or rejected, with a reason, within a set window. The team being scored cannot keep the score. This clause is the one providers resist, and the resistance is informative.

The consequence. Rejected meetings count toward nothing. Not the SLA, not the invoice, not the monthly recap deck. A definition without a consequence is a suggestion.

Why we want this clause more than clients do

We put the qualified-meeting definition in the agreement with the per-meeting fee printed beside it, and we are paid that fee only for meetings your closers accept. Padding your calendar costs us money before it costs you patience, which is precisely the incentive alignment you want from a vendor. It also forces the discipline that makes the whole engagement work: a precise ICP up front, honest disqualification on the phone, and an acceptance rate everyone watches weekly.

The same transparency argument applies to price, which is why ours is published rather than revealed at the end of a discovery sequence. Definitions and prices behave the same way: the ones that avoid daylight usually have a reason.

If you are evaluating providers, or building in-house and writing your first SDR comp plan, insist on the three clauses. And if you want to see our actual SLA language, book a strategy call. We send it before the call so you can mark it up.