A B2B Appointment Booking firm (herewith “Acme”) serves B2B technology vendors for whom it creates awareness, generates interest and sets appointments for meetings with decision makers of companies in their Ideal Customer Profile.
Acme employs people to do research, understand the vendor’s (i.e. its client’s) product or service, create compelling messaging, develop email flyers, telescript and other content, send out emails, make cold calls, and generate interest in the vendor’s offerings among companies in the target audience, finally culminating in fixing an appointment for the vendor’s sales rep for a meeting with the right person at the prospect company to take the case forward.
The revenue model of the B2B Appointment Setting business is typically “per-seat” where the firm deploys one or more resources dedicated to a customer who perform the above activities, and bills a fixed fee (say $6000 per month) per resource or “seat”.
So far Acme’s revenue model sounds like T&M (Time and Material).
However, if you dig deeper, you’d find a few key differences.
- In a T&M engagement, the customer assigns tasks to the supplier’s resources, sets output or outcome goals, monitors their performance, and otherwise actively manages them. It’s more nuanced in the case of Acme. While Acme’s resources work closely with its client’s marketing and sales orgs, they’re actively managed by Acme’s Team Leads.
- In T&M, while the supplier deploys resources who are prime facie capable of fulfilling the customer’s goals, he does not commit any output or outcome. It’s really down to the customer to extract results from the supplier’s resources. Whereas Acme does commit a certain number of appointments that will be generated by its “seat” (typically 6 per month).
- In T&M, if its resource does not perform as per the customer’s expectations, the supplier is not liable for penalty or even reduction in billing. At worse, the customer can ask for a replacement of the subpar resource with a better-performing resource. On the other hand, if an Acme resource fails to generate the agreed number of appointments per month, Acme will carry forward the shortfall to the next month. For example, if a resource generates only 4 appointments in a certain month, Acme will add the shortfall of 2 appointments to the next month, thereby taking the next month’s quota to 8 appointments (2 + 6) without any increase in billing ($6000) for that month.
Therefore, Acme is not working on a canonical T&M basis. At the same time, it does not quote a price per appointment ($1000, being $6000/6). So, it’s not working on output / outcome based model, either.
What pricing model is Acme following, then?
It seems like a hybrid model that has some characteristics of T&M, output and outcome models.
On a side note, it’s not only B2B Appointment Booking. Some other businesses work on a similar hybrid model.
Is AI-powered autogeneration of a pitchbook for an investment bank an example of producing output or outcome?
— Ketharaman Swaminathan (@s_ketharaman) March 27, 2025
Let’s see what will happen if Acme uses AI.
Many of the aforementioned activities hitherto performed by Acme’s resources can be automated by genAI. So, by using AI, Acme can generate more output / outcome with the same team or can generate the same output / outcome with a smaller team.
In the interest of retaining its revenue, Acme would gun for preserving the same headcount and generating more output / outcome. So would IT services and BPO companies.
Whether their customers accept that proposition or not would depend on whether they have a need for more workproduct or wish to settle for the same workproduct for a lower spend.
According to Economic Times article entitled Agentic AI reshaping enterprise software pricing, business models, this issue is keeping the honchos of IT and ITes industries up at night. The consensus view is that they will follow a hybrid model where they use different pricing models at different stages.
Which is what the B2B Appointment Booking business has been doing even before AI!
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