Installer guide · 16 min read

Pay Per Appointment Commercial Solar Leads

Short answer: pay per appointment means you only pay for qualified commercial site meetings that are booked into your calendar, not for raw enquiries and not for a monthly retainer. TNW Marketing checks every business for ownership, energy spend, roof suitability and buying intent before booking, each appointment is exclusive to you, and if a booking does not meet the agreed brief it is replaced or refunded.

Pricing: £250 to £1,000+VAT per booked appointment, set by system size and qualification. No retainer, no monthly fee.

Pay per appointment solar leads UK, who sells them: TNW Marketing (which publishes this page) sells exclusive commercial solar appointments at a published £250 to £1,000+VAT and bills only for attended surveys. Lead Pronto publishes booked commercial appointments from £250 and domestic ones from £130. Each from the supplier's own website, read 23 Oct 2026.

What pay per appointment means

Most lead generation is sold in one of three ways. You pay per lead (each enquiry that comes in), you pay a retainer (a fixed monthly fee for an agency's time), or you pay per appointment (each qualified sales meeting that is booked for you). Pay per appointment lead generation is the last of these: the provider does the prospecting, the calling, the qualifying and the booking, and you pay when there is a real meeting with a real buyer in your diary.

For a commercial solar installer, the appointment is a site meeting or survey with the business that owns or controls the building and pays the electricity bill: a warehouse, factory, farm, office, school or retail unit. Commercial projects are fewer and larger than domestic ones, so one good meeting is worth far more than a pile of form fills, and one wasted afternoon on a site that was never going to sign costs far more too. That is why the pricing model matters as much as the price.

It is the model TNW Marketing is built on: pre-qualified, exclusive, attended commercial solar site meetings with no retainer and no minimum spend. For the two older models in more depth, see our pay-per-lead vs retainer comparison.

Pay per lead vs pay per appointment vs retainer

The real difference between the three models is who pays for the work between "someone showed interest" and "we are stood on their roof". With pay per lead, that work is yours. With a retainer, you pay for it whether it produces meetings or not. With pay per appointment, the provider does it and only gets paid when it lands.

Pay per lead looks cheapest per unit, and it is how many lead suppliers sell. But a lead is not a sale and it is not even a meeting. Once you add the hours your team spends calling enquiries that never answer and the shared ones three other installers are already quoting, the cost per signed project is usually much higher than the headline price suggests. Our guide to what commercial solar leads really cost walks through that maths.

On price, it depends on region, system size and channel mix (our commercial solar lead generation guide covers what drives it). The number to compare between providers is cost per attended appointment, then cost per signed project, never cost per form fill.

Solar leads vs solar appointments: lead, booked, sat

Suppliers use three words for three different products, and the price only makes sense once you know which one you are buying. A raw lead is a business that showed interest. A booked appointment (also sold as pre-set, pre-qualified or booked solar appointments) is a meeting the prospect has agreed to. A sat appointment is one that actually happened, with your surveyor or salesperson in front of the decision-maker.

Each step down the table costs more per unit and leaves less work and less risk with you. A cheap lead can end up the most expensive way to fill a diary if most never reach a survey; a booked appointment is only good value if the terms say what happens when the customer is not there. Before you buy solar appointments from anyone, ask:

• Is the price per lead, per booked appointment or per appointment that goes ahead?
• What happens after a no-show or a cancellation: replaced, refunded or charged?
• Who confirms the appointment beforehand, and how?
• Will I be meeting the decision-maker, or someone who works there?
• What was checked before booking: ownership, energy spend, roof, timeline?
• Is it exclusive to me, and does it come with a written summary of the site?
• What share of booked appointments go ahead, and how is that measured? Two suppliers publish a figure: Lead Pronto states 82% of its booked appointments are attended, and TNW's show rate is 60%+ (TNW does not charge for the ones that do not go ahead). They may not be measured the same way, so ask.

For the full line-up of UK suppliers and their terms, see our solar lead generation companies compared, and for the pricing models side by side, pay per lead vs retainer vs pay per appointment.

What counts as an attended appointment

"Appointment" means different things to different providers, so it is worth being exact. At TNW Marketing you are billed only for qualified, attended commercial surveys. An appointment counts when:

• It is a site meeting booked into your calendar with the business, not a callback request or an email address.
• You are meeting the decision-maker or bill payer (owner, MD, finance director or facilities lead), not just somebody who works there.
• The business has been checked against the qualification points below before the booking was made.
• It matches the brief you set: the areas you cover and the type of site you want.
• It is exclusive to you. Nobody else is booked into the same site.

If a booking does not meet the agreed brief, it is replaced or refunded. The same goes for no-shows and cancellations: you are not charged for a meeting that did not happen. TNW's show rate is 60%+: most booked meetings go ahead as planned, and the ones that don't are not what you pay for.

Dean Walmsley, MD of Castle Eco Solutions, described five commercial surveys in three weeks with a finance director or MD at every one. Sam Ward of Sam Ward Electrical pointed to always dealing with the bill payer. You can hear both, and the rest, on our video reviews page and in the case studies.

How qualification works

Qualification is what makes a pay per appointment model work. A provider paid per meeting has every reason to check a business properly before booking it, because an unqualified booking is one they replace or refund. Every commercial prospect TNW Marketing books is checked for:

• Ownership: the business owns the building, or has landlord consent and a long enough lease to make solar worthwhile.
• Energy spend: billing and meters, so the site has enough daytime electricity use to justify a commercial system.
• Site suitability: roof type, roof space and any roofing issues, or land for a ground-mount array.
• Decision-maker access: the person who can sign off the spend is the person you will meet.
• Buying intent: a realistic timeline and a reason to act, rather than "just getting prices".

Each booking comes with a write-up covering energy usage, bill spend, location and the likely system size, which is the detail an MCS site survey needs. SRC North West described pre-qualified leads like this as making the first call "twice as valuable" compared with providers who only passed on names and numbers. For the full checklist and the questions to ask on a first call, read how to qualify commercial solar leads.

Appointment setting services vs pay per appointment

If you search for appointment setting in the UK, most of what you find is general B2B appointment setting: outsourced callers or SDR teams who book meetings for software firms, consultancies and IT providers. Many of those appointment setting services charge by the hour, by the caller or by the month, which is a retainer by another name.

Solar appointment setting is narrower and harder. The caller has to understand ownership versus lease, half-hourly metering, roof condition and grid constraints well enough to know whether a site is worth your surveyor's day. TNW Marketing only does commercial solar appointment setting for installers, and we are paid per qualified appointment, so the checks are built around what you need before a survey rather than what an SDR needs to hit an activity target.

How many appointments you need

Pay per appointment makes planning simple, because you can work backwards from installs. Start with the number of commercial installs you want each month and divide by the share of site surveys your team closes. That is how many attended appointments you need. For example, if your team closes one in three surveys and you want two installs a month, you need around six attended appointments a month. (These are illustrative figures; use your own.)

Our free lead calculator does this for you and also shows how many raw leads you would need to generate the same surveys yourself, which is the clearest way to see what pay per lead really asks of your team.

Who pay per appointment suits (and who it does not)

It tends to suit:

• Commercial and C&I solar installers whose surveyors and salespeople would rather sell than prospect.
• Growing installers who want to add appointments as their team grows, without renegotiating a retainer.
• Installers who have been burned by shared leads or by agencies that took a fee and delivered little.
• Teams that want spend tied to outcomes and a cost per signed project they can actually measure.

It is a weaker fit if:

• You mainly want brand awareness or general marketing rather than booked meetings.
• You already have a large in-house calling team that needs volume of raw enquiries to work.
• You cannot attend site meetings promptly in the areas you ask us to cover.

If you are comparing suppliers, our solar leads UK comparison sets UK providers side by side on exclusivity, qualification and replacements, and our explainer on how solar leads are priced compares paying per lead, per appointment and by retainer.

How to get started

1. See available projects: create your installer account and look at the commercial projects currently ready for survey.
2. Set your brief: the areas you cover and the kinds of commercial sites you want to meet.
3. Choose the appointments that suit you. Each comes with the full write-up, and you are never pushed to take one.
4. Attend the site meeting, survey and sell. Anything that does not meet the brief is replaced or refunded.

There is no retainer, no minimum spend and no long contract. Have a question first? Read the TNW Marketing FAQ or contact the team.