What counts as a held meeting, and what never gets billed

A held meeting is a call that actually happened, with someone who matches the definition you wrote, and your own meeting owner on the line. It is the only thing Dylan bills, and you decide what it means before a single email goes out.

Booked, held, qualified: three different meetings

Appointment setting has a vocabulary problem, and it costs buyers money. A booked meeting is a time on a calendar; a held meeting is a call that took place; a qualified meeting is a held call with someone who fits what you agreed to in advance.

The gap between those words is where budgets disappear. OutboundPros, an outbound agency, gives a blunt example: when an agency celebrates 20 booked meetings, 6 people never show and 5 sit outside the target profile, “you did not buy 20 meetings. You bought 9 usable conversations.”

Dylan’s held meeting is the strict version: held and qualified, or not billed at all.

The held meeting definition you write

Every Dylan brief includes one, and a good one has three parts:

• Who counts. The companies (industry, size, region) and the people (function and seniority) you want to meet. “Decision-makers” is not a definition.
• Who takes it on your side. Your meeting owner: the person whose calendar Dylan books into and who runs the call.
• What the prospect gets. The reason they agreed to meet, in one line. A meeting booked on a vague promise rarely goes anywhere.

Here is a complete one (an example; the company and the person are invented):

Who counts: VP Operations, Head of Fleet or Fleet Manager at US trucking and logistics companies with 201 to 1,000 employees. Meeting owner: Sam, Head of Sales. What the prospect gets: a 20-minute review of their fleet’s fuel spend.

What most buyers overlook is that the definition is also the targeting rule. Dylan uses it to decide who to write to, so a loose one fills your calendar with the wrong calls.

And an unbilled meeting is still not free: your meeting owner prepares for it, takes it and follows up, all on a senior person’s time.

Settle the awkward cases now, while nobody has an opinion about a specific meeting: if the VP you targeted sends a director, does that count, and if your meeting owner is away, may a colleague take the call? Write the answers into the definition. Every rule decided in advance is an argument you never have.

What never gets billed

Four things are never billed, whatever else happens:

• No-shows. If the person does not join, you pay nothing, and Dylan rebooks.
• People on your do-not-contact list. They should never have been contacted, so you never pay for meeting them.
• Duplicates. The same meeting is never billed twice.
• Anyone outside your definition. A meeting with the wrong person is not a held meeting, however pleasant the call.

The same OutboundPros piece puts no-show rates anywhere from 10% to 35%, depending on segment, seniority and booking flow, and under booked pricing each one is a meeting you paid for and did not get. We bill no-shows at zero because getting the right person to show up is part of our job, not yours.

Disputes, the deposit and the stop-loss

If you think a billed meeting should not have been, you have 72 hours after it to dispute, and disputes come back as credit. Seventy-two hours is long enough to check the facts and short enough that they are still facts; a window measured in months turns every invoice into a draft.

A good dispute points at the definition, not at the mood of the call. “The person who joined was an analyst, and our definition says director and above” is a dispute; “they were not ready to buy” is not, because readiness was never in the definition. If it should be, add it, and accept that Dylan will then book fewer meetings.

To start, you prepay three meetings as credit: $750 on Lite, $1,500 on Standard, and three meetings at the quoted price on Enterprise. Each held meeting draws it down. If no meeting is held within 60 days, the deposit comes back, and if you pause, unused credit stays on your account.

So the worst case is easy to state: a few minutes on a brief, some time approving a plan and a handful of emails, and your deposit back after 60 days. Sixty days is the whole bet, and it is more ours than yours.

Traders use a stop-loss order for a simple reason: the moment a trade goes wrong is the worst moment to decide when to get out, so they decide before they go in.

Dylan has one too. If 1,000 contacts bring no positive reply, he pauses, tells you what he heard and proposes a new angle, and you approve it or leave with your deposit.

The exit is decided before the first email, not after a quarter of hoping.

That is why we keep our own rules strict. If we could bill for no-shows or loose fits, we would be paid for activity, which is exactly what pay per meeting was meant to end.

What to do next

Write your meeting definition before you talk to any vendor, us included. Three lines are enough: who counts, who takes the meeting on your side, and what the prospect gets from the call. Then list the companies that must never hear from you: current customers, open deals, partners and anyone a colleague is already talking to.

Take both to every vendor you consider and ask them to show you, in writing, what they bill and what they never bill. For the rest of the brief, see how to brief an AI SDR.