What an ISA actually costs per booked appointment
The salary is the line item you notice. The real per-appointment number is two or three times higher once you include everything you're actually paying for.
Broker-owners love comparing a $4,000/month ISA salary to a $3,500 sprint and calling the ISA "cheaper." The comparison is wrong because the $4,000 isn't the actual cost of an ISA. It's the part that shows up on the P&L most prominently.
Pull the fully-loaded number and the math flips.
The full load
A mid-tier ISA in Houston, Phoenix, or Charlotte averages $42k base + $6k variable. Add:
- Payroll taxes, unemployment, workers comp: ~8% → $3,840
- Health insurance contribution: $5,400/year
- Desktop, phone, two monitors, dialer seat: $2,400/year
- CRM seat (Arive/Salesforce/GHL): $1,800/year
- Training + ramp time (first 90 days produce ~40% of steady-state): $4,200 in lost opportunity
- Manager oversight (partial FTE): $6,000/year
- Recruiting + replacement cost (ISAs have ~30% annual turnover): $3,800/year amortized
Total annual cost: ~$75,000. Monthly: $6,250. The $4,000 salary was 64% of the real number.
What does $6,250 buy per month
Industry data on ISA performance is remarkably consistent. A trained ISA makes 70-85 dials/day, hits a 20-30% contact rate, and books appointments at 5-8% of contacts. Run it:
- 80 dials × 22 working days = 1,760 dials/month
- 25% contact rate = 440 connected conversations
- 6% appointment rate = ~26 booked appointments/month
$6,250 / 26 appointments = $240 per booked appointment.
Bump the contact and booking rates to the top of the range (which most ISAs don't hold across the year) and you still land around $175-200/appointment.
What the sprint looks like in the same frame
Reactivation Sprint: $3,500 flat, 14 days. Guarantee: 10 booked. Actual median in deployments: 12-14 booked.
$3,500 / 12 appointments = ~$290/appointment. Slightly more per booking than the ISA — but with four differences that matter:
- Zero ramp time. Day 7 is at steady-state.
- No overhead creep. The sprint is one SKU.
- No turnover risk. The agent doesn't quit.
- Built-in guarantee. If it misses 10, you pay nothing — that pulls the realized cost toward zero in bad sprints.
Where the math gets interesting
ISAs are great at live transfers, objection cycles on warm leads, and negotiating specific rate scenarios. They're bad at volume reactivation of aged lists because the rejection loop breaks them.
Put the ISA on live transfers where they earn their seat. Put the voice agent on aged-list grinding where it never tires. Your ISA spend stops evaporating into dials that go nowhere, and the aged database that was generating zero starts producing 10+ appointments a sprint.
The per-appointment cost isn't actually the point. The throughput is. One ISA makes 26 appointments a month; one sprint makes 12 in 14 days and you can run a new one on day 15. Pipeline is a function of how many shots on goal you take. Run the math on yours with us.