The Sourced Spread, Side by Side
| Channel | Reported close rate | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Cold call / door-to-door | 1 to 3% | kokoquest.com |
| Purchased shared leads | 5 to 15% | kokoquest.com |
| Accountant / CPA referral | 40 to 60% | kokoquest.com |
| Telemarketed / booked appointment | No independent figure found | Not published anywhere in this research |
All three published percentages trace back to one source. The fourth row is a real, confirmed gap, not a rounding error.
Why This Is a Single-Source Figure, and What That Means
Every version of this three-way breakdown found in this research traces to kokoquest.com. It is a vendor and practitioner content source, not an academic study, a trade-association survey, or a controlled experiment. That does not make the numbers wrong. It means you should read them as one operator's working estimate of how these channels rank against each other, not as an industry-audited benchmark you can cite as settled fact.
Use the spread the way it was almost certainly intended: to decide where a marginal dollar of prospecting effort goes next, not to forecast next quarter's revenue to the decimal point.
Why Referrals Sit So Far Above Everything Else
A 40 to 60% close rate on accountant or CPA referrals is not a small edge over 1 to 3% D2D, it is roughly 15 to 40 times higher. The plausible reason is trust transfer: an accountant introducing an agent has already answered the two questions a cold pitch spends the whole conversation trying to answer, is this person legitimate, and is this worth my time. A referral source's own credibility does that work before the agent ever opens their mouth.
Why Cold D2D Still Gets Run at Volume Despite a 1 to 3% Close Rate
The economics make more sense once you look at what an ISO actually pays per channel. James Shepherd of CCSalesPro states ISOs will pay roughly $700 for a Facebook-sourced account, but only $200 to $300 for one a cold-calling field agent brings in. Even at a 1 to 3% close rate, an agent who sustains real daily volume, Shepherd's own claim is 20 new businesses a day, five days a week, for a year, can land $3,000 to $5,000-plus a month in residual income. The low close rate is offset by low cost per acquired account, which is exactly why the channel persists despite the grind.
Where Purchased Shared Leads Actually Land
Shared leads run $20 to $80 each but are commonly resold to five to ten other agents simultaneously. At the 5 to 15% close rate kokoquest reports for this channel, the effective cost to acquire one merchant works out to $200 to $1,600, a wide range driven almost entirely by where your specific batch lands inside that close-rate spread. The full math, including payback timing, is worked through in the companion CAC guide linked below.
The Channel With No Public Close-Rate Number: Booked Appointments
Elite Call and TopLead both publish a per-appointment price ($600 and $300 to $350 respectively), but neither one, and nothing else found in this research, publishes an independent close rate specifically for a booked or qualified appointment. That is a real, confirmed gap in the public record, not evidence one way or the other.
Reasoning through it: a double-confirmed appointment matched to written qualification criteria sits closer to a warm referral than a cold walk-in on the trust spectrum, since the merchant has already agreed to a specific time to talk. But that is reasoning, not a sourced statistic, and it is presented here as reasoning rather than as a number to cite.
What this means for you
- 1-3% D2D, 5-15% shared leads, 40-60% CPA referrals: the full spread, from kokoquest.com.
- All three figures trace to a single source and are directional, not a controlled study. Use them to rank channels relative to each other, not as guaranteed outcomes.
- No independently published close rate exists for booked or telemarketed appointments specifically. That is a real gap in the public record worth flagging rather than filling with a guess.
Sources
The external data in this guide draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- kokoquest.com, merchant services lead generation resource
- CCSalesPro, "Does Cold Calling Still Work Selling Merchant Services?"
- Elite Call, merchant services appointments
- TopLead, merchant services leads pricing