The Invoice Lands When The Form Does

A BJJ gym owner asked on Reddit whether other owners had any experience of using a marketing service. One of the replies is the fairest summary of the pay-per-lead deal I have read.

"In the end they can get you leads, whether it's worth it depends on your ability to convert those leads."

That's the honest version of the pay-per-lead deal. The supplier's job finishes at the form. Yours starts there.

What is a pay per lead marketing agency?

A company that charges per enquiry instead of per month. It writes the ads, runs them, collects names and numbers through a form, and sends you the names. You pay for each one.

One firm that sells leads describes it in much the same terms. Rex Direct, a company that sells lead generation and offers on the same page to generate leads for you, defines pay per lead as "a performance-based pricing model where an advertiser pays a fixed cost for each qualified lead delivered", a lead being "a potential customer who has expressed interest and submitted contact details such as name, phone number, and email".

The appeal is obvious if you have ever paid a retainer and watched nothing happen. No monthly fee, no twelve months of "give it more time", no invoice arriving in a month where the mat looked exactly the same as the month before. In our experience most marketing companies charge monthly regardless of the results they get, and moving off that is a real improvement.

Just be clear about how far it moves. Paying per lead takes the advertising risk off you. It does not take the rest of the risk off you, because the rest of the risk lives after the form.

What are you actually buying when you pay per lead?

A name, a mobile number and an email address. Sometimes a child's age, sometimes not.

Here is what that leaves on your desk, in order, on a night you are teaching:

1. Someone has to see the enquiry and reply, fast. Inside fifteen minutes, by text, from the number your school already texts from. Somebody who sells leads for a living put the cost of being slow in one line, on r/smallbusiness, the Reddit board where owners swap notes: "Callback queues finish it off. Ten minutes late and they're quoting two competitors." Swap competitors for the other schools in your town and it's the same sentence.
2. Someone has to turn a reply into an agreed day and time, and to get there before the family's interest cools or they book somewhere else.
3. Someone has to remind them, more than once, so that the booking survives until Tuesday.
4. Someone has to deal with the ones who go quiet.
5. Someone has to teach the trial and run the enrolment conversation afterwards.

Steps one to four are the work your supplier has already been paid for not doing. If you've got a front desk and somebody rostered to reply on every teaching night, you can absorb that and the maths can be fine. If you're the person on the mat at six, the names will sit, and the leads you never booked are the most expensive thing in this model. You paid for every one of them.

We have written separately about what the four billing models each pay a marketer to do. This page assumes you have already decided to buy leads and are choosing who from.

At what point does the invoice trigger?

This is the one question. Ask it first, in exactly these words, and the answer reprices everything else.

A supplier paid when a form is submitted is paid for volume of forms. A supplier paid when a family has chosen a class time is paid for forms that turn into bookings, so it'll chase, qualify and chase again, because it earns nothing otherwise. A supplier paid when somebody walks through your door is paid for the only event you can actually teach.

None of that is dishonest. Everyone optimises for the thing they get paid for. The further down that list the trigger sits, the more of the chain the supplier has to make work before it earns anything, and the less of it is left on your desk.

There's a limit to how far it can sensibly go, and the clearest statement of it I've seen came from somebody selling this stuff. A commenter on r/smallbusiness, advising another agency on how to price a pay-per-meeting deal, wrote: "A no-show still counts if the person confirmed. You control whether someone agrees to meet you. You don't control their morning." Same logic at your end. Nobody outside your building can control what happens at your desk once the family is in it.

So ask it plainly. At what point do you invoice me: the form, the booked class, or the walk-in? Then ask what the supplier does between those points, and who does it.

Which leads do you actually get charged for?

The second question. Ask it before the first invoice rather than after it.

Get the definition in writing before you sign. A lead you should be paying for has, at minimum, been checked against the things that decide whether anyone ever walks in:

• Age. For a children's class, the child's name and age or age bracket, so you know they actually fit a class you run.
• Distance. They know where your school is before they book. Families enquiring from too far away either never show, or show once and never come back.
• Full contact details. Name, mobile and email, before a class time is picked.
• A real time, within a week. Neil's rule is not to let a family book more than a week out, because the no-show rate goes up.

Those four are what lift booking quality and show rate, and a supplier that applies none of them is billing you for the raw form. Ask what it does about duplicates, about numbers that bounce, about the same family enquiring twice in a month, and about whether your enquiry can also be sold to another school down the road.

That is the industry's own account too. The same Rex Direct explainer says "the defining factor is qualification", that businesses "define what makes a lead valid, including geography, intent, and demographics, and only pay for leads that meet those criteria", and it lists "unclear lead definitions", "too many buyers on shared leads" and "slow response times" among the model's common pitfalls. On shared leads it is blunt: they are "sold to multiple buyers", which buys you a lower price and more competition.

The agency side knows exactly how this goes wrong. The same commenter, earlier in that thread, warned the agency owner: "Picture month one. You book ten, they come back and say four of them weren't real, and now you're arguing about a definition nobody wrote down. Doesn't matter what you charged at that point, the account is gone." His advice was to "agree the definition before you agree the price", and to get two or three specific reasons a booking can be rejected written down alongside it.

That's advice to the seller, and it works just as well from your chair. Ask for the definition and the reject rules in writing, in the same email, before anybody talks about price.

How do I know if the leads are any good?

Not by the price, and not by how many arrived. By what happened downstream.

A cheap lead source that never produces a student is worth cutting. A dearer one that fills your beginner class is worth keeping, and the lead price was never the thing to compare.

This is why the report can look great while the mat looks the same. Clicks and forms are activity. Activity without outcomes is what creates the anxious feeling you get reading a monthly report, and "give it more time" is the tell that nobody is measuring the end of the chain either.

So measure the end of the chain yourself. Four numbers, every month, beside the invoice.

What should I tell the supplier afterwards?

The part we watch owners skip, and it costs them.

Everything your supplier does online can be tracked. What it can't see is who the family turned out to be once they were standing in your lobby: whether they lived nearby, whether the child was the right age, whether they could afford your tuition. If the wrong families keep walking in and nobody tells the supplier, it sees enquiries landing and assumes everything is going well.

Give it the names of the ones that didn't fit, and why. That is how the targeting gets corrected. Without it, you are paying someone to keep aiming at a target they can't see.

Where we sit in this

We're a pay-per-show company, so take this as an interested party being straight with you rather than a neutral one.

We get paid when a student walks into your school. There's no retainer and no contract, you're not locked in, and nobody is charged for a pause. That's the whole public pricing story, and the rest belongs on a call.

We don't invoice at the form because a form isn't a student, and we don't invoice at the enrolment either, because we weren't in the room when the family signed and we can't hear what was said at your desk. The walk-in is the last step we control, so it's where we think the line belongs. The split is the same with every school we work with: we find the families, get them booked and remind them to come. You welcome them, run a great first class, and enrol them.

If you'd rather buy leads, buy them. Just buy them from somebody who will answer the five questions above in writing.

What to do Monday

Take last month's invoice from whoever you buy leads from, and write four numbers beside it:

1. Leads paid for.
2. Families who booked a class.
3. Families who walked in.
4. Families who enrolled.

Three of those four numbers are ones only you can see. Divide the invoice by the last one and you have the only figure worth comparing between two suppliers.

Then do the same sum for the names you get from a family referring a friend, and you will know where next month's effort belongs.

If you'd like to go through your four numbers with us, book a time here and bring your timetable. If we don't think we can fill your spaces, we'll say so on the call.

Questions owners ask

What is a pay per lead marketing agency?

A company that charges you for each enquiry it sends rather than a monthly fee. It runs the advertising, collects names and numbers through a form, and bills you per name. The advertising risk sits with them. Everything after the form is yours: ringing the family, getting a class time agreed, making sure they turn up.

Is pay per lead worth it for a martial arts school?

It depends entirely on what happens to a lead once it reaches you. A school where someone answers a new enquiry by text within fifteen minutes, every teaching night, turns a decent share of names into trials. A school where names sit until Thursday does not, and buying more of them changes nothing. Fix the answering first, then buy.

How much should you pay per lead?

The price on its own tells you nothing. A dearer lead that produces students is cheaper than a bargain one that produces none. Judge the supplier on what happened downstream: how many of last month's names booked a class, how many walked in, how many enrolled. That is the only comparison between two suppliers that means anything.

What is the difference between pay per lead and pay per appointment?

The billing point. Pay per lead triggers when a form is submitted, so you get a name and a number. Pay per appointment triggers when the family has chosen a day and a time, so the supplier has done the contacting and the booking before it earns anything. Paying per show moves it one step further again, to the family actually walking in.

Who owns the leads in a pay per lead deal?

Ask, in writing, before you sign. Three things decide it: whose ad account the campaigns run in, which system the names land in, and whether the same enquiry can be sold to another school. If you leave, you want the ad account, the audience data and the contact list to leave with you, and that is far easier to agree at the start than at the end.