Joel Kaplan added more than a hundred new clients to his agency last year using a new pay per show model. Stop going for retainers and switch to a performance based pricing structure if you want to stay in business, he says. Is there any truth to that? On second thought, is he even saying anything new? Haven’t some agencies been charging their clients per lead (or “show” or sale) for forever? Read on for my Joel Kaplan review.
Joel claims the retainer model is dying; the agency bubble is about to burst. When Covid hit, his agency, Atlas Digital, lost clients left and right. They had to stop the bleeding. How could they remove the risk for their clients so they would stay on despite all the chaos and uncertainty in the world? They thought, what if we only charged them when a lead actually shows up for an appointment? Turns out, that question was worth millions.
Since transitioning to pay per show, they’ve been killing it. PPS makes it easier for you to land new clients and keep them. It allows you to make more too. Now you have an upside instead of just a flat fifteen hundred a month or whatever it is. The caveat is, you actually have to be able to deliver results. Weird how that works, huh?
Even if you’re doing fine charging clients a fixed rate per month, just be careful. If the market sophisticates faster than you innovate, you could get left behind. Your PPS competitors might eat your lunch. Especially with a market correction looming. Businesses simply can’t afford to be wasteful today; every dollar spent on marketing and advertising has to count. PPS guarantees it will.
Joel believes pay per show, specifically, is superior to other performance based compensation. For example, with pay per lead, clients might complain about lead quality. With pay per appointment, if you get too many no shows, same thing. What about pay per sale? It’s too hard to track. You can get screwed out of a lot of money. Pay per show is as close to perfect as it gets. Clients only pay for quality leads that show up; it’s trackable. Win-win.
You need three things to make the PPS model hum. One, artificial intelligence that follows up with your leads 24/7. This maximizes the percentage of your leads that engage. Two, a remote call center that phones leads and ensures they show up to their scheduled appointment. Third and final, virtual assistants that can fill in the gaps. With all three in place, you can crush it in almost any niche. Just not ecom or restaurants, Joel says.
What about billing though? You can either use the honor system, and take the client’s word as to whether or not a lead showed for their appointment; or use automation, call centers, or virtual assistants to follow up with the leads after their slotted appointment and see if they showed. If so, you mark it down and use a billing software to instantly ding your client’s credit card. Want to know more about Joel’s Pay Per Show Agency program? Book a call with his team. The cost is likely five grand or more. Or, click below to see how to run PPS using only free traffic from Google.
