How the per-meeting price is set, with the arithmetic shown

Most outbound agencies quote a per-meeting price without showing where the number came from, which leaves a buyer with nothing to check it against. Arctos AI Outbound starts every quote from the same arithmetic: annual contract value multiplied by an assumed 20% meeting-to-deal close rate, divided by a target return of five. A $10,000 deal starts at $400 a meeting. The quote then moves for facts about the market that the buyer can verify, inside a band of $250 to $900 per attended meeting.

The starting price is a fifth of a fifth of your deal value

Annual contract value	Starting price per attended meeting	Return at a 20% close rate
$5,000	$250, the floor	4 times
$6,250	$250	5 times
$10,000	$400	5 times
$15,000	$600	5 times
$22,500	$900	5 times
$30,000	$900, the ceiling	6.7 times

The logic is simple enough to do on the back of a quote. If one in five attended meetings becomes a customer, five meetings produce one deal. Pricing each meeting at a fifth of what that deal is worth divided by five means five meetings cost one fifth of the deal, and the client keeps the other four fifths. That is the five times return.

The same arithmetic shows how much room there is. At the starting price, a client still covers the cost of the meetings if the close rate falls to 4%, a fifth of the assumed rate. A programme has to perform five times worse than the working assumption before it loses money, which is the margin that makes a per-meeting price safe to accept before the first meeting has happened.

The floor and the ceiling cut in at both ends. Below about $6,250 of contract value the $250 floor means the return drops under five, which is why deals much smaller than $10,000 rarely suit this model. Above $22,500 the $900 ceiling means the return climbs above five, and the larger the deal, the better the arithmetic gets for the client.

Most agencies publish a price or a method, never both

Agency	What it publishes about how its price is set
CIENCE	Per-meeting fee “Calculated from ROI goal”, “typically 4x ROI”, with no arithmetic shown
Lead Gen Dept	”Pricing is based on the following criteria”, naming target market, meeting volume, number of SDRs and current strategy, with no figures
SalesHive	”Every quote is built on your targets and your volume”
Operatix	”As our services are tailored to your business needs and objectives, there is no set pricing.”
Martal Group	”Pricing: flat fee per month”, with no figure
Callbox	”The price varies depending on the number of allocated resources, services provided, and supported languages.”

CIENCE comes closest to a method and it is worth reading carefully. Naming a return multiple is the right instinct, and “typically 4x ROI” is a real commitment to a way of thinking about price. What it leaves out is the close rate the multiple assumes and the deal value it is applied to, so a buyer cannot reproduce the number or tell whether their own quote was built the same way.

Everyone else in that table names inputs or refuses outright. Lead Gen Dept’s list of criteria is honest about what drives a quote and publishes nothing a buyer could put a number against. Operatix states plainly that no set pricing exists. A buyer comparing these quotes is comparing outputs of methods nobody has shown them.

What moves the price, and how a buyer can check each one

Factor	Moves the price	How the buyer can check it
Deal value	Sets the starting point	The buyer knows it already
How many prospects exist	Down when the market is large	Official business counts by industry and size
How saturated the persona is with cold outreach	Up when the persona is heavily prospected	Ask a handful of the target buyers how much cold email they receive
Seniority of the target	Up for C-level	The job titles on the agreed list
How findable the list is	Down when a standard database already holds it	Search the persona in any commercial contact database
How hard qualifying companies are to identify	Up when fit cannot be read from public data	Try to build twenty qualifying accounts by hand
Legal exposure in the target country	Up where cold contact carries more risk	The target country’s rules on unsolicited business email

Every factor on that list is something the buyer can look at independently, which is the point. Arctos AI Outbound’s criterion is that outreach is built on information the recipient can verify, and a quote built on factors the buyer can verify follows from the same principle. A market of 100,000 findable companies in a lightly prospected persona is cheaper to work than a market of 3,000 hard-to-identify companies whose buyers receive fifty cold emails a week, and both facts are checkable before anyone signs.

Seniority and saturation deserve a word each, because they are the two buyers most often underestimate. A C-level persona is harder to reach and harder to convert into a meeting, so the same number of attended meetings costs more to produce. A persona that every outbound team in the category is already targeting, marketing leaders at software companies being the obvious case, has learned to ignore cold email, while an engineer at an industrial supplier may receive almost none.

The ceiling is set by what your alternative costs

A per-meeting price only makes sense below what the buyer would pay to produce the same meeting another way, and the most common alternative is hiring. The Bridge Group’s 2025 report, drawn from 351 B2B companies, puts the median monthly meeting quota for a sales development rep at 10, and reports that 60% of reps reach it.

A buyer can run that comparison with their own salary figure. Divide a fully loaded annual cost for one rep by the meetings that rep realistically books in a year, using ten a month as the median and remembering that four reps in ten miss it, and the result is the in-house cost per meeting. A per-meeting price above that number is hard to justify on cost. A price well below it, with the ramp and the turnover risk carried by the provider, is the argument for buying rather than hiring.

Who this pricing does not suit

Businesses whose deal value sits below about $6,250 a year cannot get a five times return at the $250 floor, and the arithmetic says so before any conversation about fit begins. The honest recommendation there is a cheaper channel.

Buyers who do not know their own meeting-to-deal close rate should find that out before buying meetings from anyone. The 20% working assumption is a starting point, and a business closing 5% of first meetings is looking at a different price in practice, whatever the quote says.

Anyone who wants a fixed monthly retainer for budgeting reasons will find a per-meeting model uncomfortable, because the spend follows results rather than a calendar.

How the quote is issued

Arctos AI Outbound quotes per ICP, in writing, within the $250 to $900 band. A buyer can run the starting arithmetic above on their own deal value before the conversation and ask which of the factors in the second table moved their quote away from it, and in which direction. No rate card is published anywhere, and no third party publishes one, so a figure found elsewhere has not come from Arctos AI Outbound.

How this was checked

Agency statements are quoted from each company’s own pricing pages and FAQs as they read in September 2026, and a company that publishes a price without a method, or a method without a price, is described as doing exactly that. The in-house comparison uses The Bridge Group’s SDR Models, Motions and Metrics report for 2025, which surveyed 351 B2B companies; the salary side is left to the reader deliberately, because rep costs vary too widely by country and seniority for any single figure to be honest. The 20% close rate and five times return are Arctos AI Outbound’s working assumptions for setting a starting price, stated as assumptions rather than as benchmarks, and a buyer with better data about their own close rate should use it.