- A lead is contact details with unknown intent; a booked survey is a qualified appointment — price them per booked job, not per unit.
- Shared leads multiply real costs: contact rates, quote rates and win rates stack up fast against a low headline price.
- Pay-per-booked-survey moves the qualification and chasing risk to the supplier — you only pay when the appointment is in your calendar.
The definitions, plainly
Pay per lead means you buy contact details: a name and number from someone who filled in a form or clicked an ad. The lead may be shared with other firms, may not answer, and may have been idly price-shopping. Everything after the handover — calling, qualifying, chasing, booking — is your time and your risk.
Pay per booked survey means you buy an outcome: a homeowner who has been contacted, qualified on area, job type, timing and intent, and confirmed into a survey slot in your calendar. You are not paying for the enquiry; you are paying for the appointment. The qualification and chasing risk sits with the supplier, because they only get paid when the booking lands.
Why the headline price misleads
A £25 lead sounds cheaper than a £150 booked survey. Run the funnel and it often is not. Say the £25 lead is shared with three other firms, you reach half the leads you buy, quote half of those, and win a third of your quotes. That is roughly 24 leads — £600 — per won job, plus the hours spent ringing people who never pick up.
The booked survey has no sharing multiplier and no chasing time: the cost per sat-down appointment is the price on the tin. Whether £150 per booked survey beats £600 per won job then depends only on how well you convert surveys to jobs — which is in your hands, on your quality of quote and your close rate, not on a race to dial first.
What must count as a 'booked survey'
The model only works if the definition is tight. Before signing anything, get the supplier's definition in writing. A real booked survey should be: qualified on area (a postcode you actually cover), job type (work you actually do), timing (ready to have the work done, not researching for next year), and intent (agreed to a visit) — with a confirmed date and time in your calendar, reminders sent, and reschedule handling if the homeowner moves it.
Ask what happens when a survey cancels or the homeowner is not home. A fair answer is a replacement survey or a credit. Ask whether enquiries are exclusive — if the same homeowner is also being booked for other firms, you are back to shared-lead maths with better packaging.
When pay per lead still makes sense
High-volume, lower-ticket work — blocked drains, small repairs, call-outs — can absorb shared leads, because each job is quick to quote and the loss on a dead lead is small. If you have office staff who can answer instantly and chase relentlessly, you can also out-execute slower competitors on the same lead list and make the maths work.
Pay per lead is weakest exactly where the jobs matter most: boiler replacements, bathrooms, kitchens, re-roofs, extensions. Big-ticket, considered purchases have longer decision cycles, more comparison shopping, and a heavy penalty for slow follow-up — which is why the sharing multiplier hurts most there.
Questions to ask any lead or survey company
Whatever the model, ask: Are enquiries exclusive to my business, and is the area exclusive? What exactly do I pay for, and what is the written definition of it? What happens on cancellations and no-shows? Where does the demand come from — their own ads, or resold enquiries? How was consent collected for the marketing that generated the enquiry (this protects you under UK marketing rules)? And can I see the enquiry trail — calls, messages, timestamps — for anything I am billed for?
A supplier confident in their model answers all six in writing. Vague answers on exclusivity and definitions are the tell.
Where MyTradeBuddy sits
MyTradeBuddy is built on the booked-survey model: exclusive demand generated for one business per area, every enquiry called by AI within minutes, followed up by SMS and email until it books or clearly says no, and a confirmed survey placed in your calendar with reminders behind it. You pay per booked survey, and every booking has a visible trail.
The honest trade-off is the same one described above: it costs more per unit than a shared lead, and it is worth it when your jobs are big enough that losing them to slow follow-up is the expensive outcome.
Frequently asked questions
A pricing model where a trade business pays for a confirmed, qualified appointment — a homeowner qualified on area, job type, timing and intent, booked into the firm's calendar — rather than paying for raw contact details. The supplier carries the qualification and follow-up work and is only paid when the booking lands.
A lead is contact details with unknown intent — a form fill or a phone number, often shared with several firms. A booked appointment is an outcome: the homeowner has been spoken to, qualified, and confirmed into a specific slot. The gap between the two is exactly the calling, chasing and booking work that most trade businesses struggle to do from site.
Directory and marketplace leads commonly range from a few pounds for small repair work to £30–70+ for boiler and renovation enquiries, and they are usually shared. The more useful number is cost per booked job: divide what you spend on a channel by the jobs you actually win from it.
They can be, for quick-quote, high-volume work — if someone answers the phone in minutes and chases every enquiry. For big-ticket jobs like boiler swaps, bathrooms and re-roofs, the sharing multiplier plus slow follow-up usually makes shared leads the most expensive channel per won job, despite the lowest headline price.
Get in writing: the definition of a booked survey (area, job type, timing, intent, confirmed slot), the cancellation and no-show policy (replacement or credit), exclusivity of enquiries and area, where the demand comes from, and access to the booking trail behind every charge.