Free discovery call, cheap eval, or full price: what should my front-end offer be?

Why this question shows up right after the ads go live

Five of my last 58 sales calls asked some version of this, and it never came up before launch. It comes up two weeks in, when the leads are arriving and the owner is asking "if they came from an ad, should they go to the cheaper visit?" or "people ask about pricing immediately." Six calls in the same backlog used the words tire kickers or price-shopping. Those are the same problem seen from two sides: the offer at the front of the funnel decides who fills out the form, and the form decides who you spend your evenings calling.

The numbers make the trade visible. In the Campfire Benchmark, which pools 15 cash PT and chiro ad accounts from October 2025 through September 2026, a patient lead cost $61.34 once lead-magnet downloads are removed. A booked appointment, measured only in the three accounts that fire a Schedule event, cost $131.96 of ad spend. The gap between those two figures is the people who raised their hand and never booked. Your front-end offer is the biggest lever you have on that gap.

The three offers, side by side

• Free discovery call or screen. Lowest cost per lead, highest volume, lowest intent. It works when someone reaches the lead within minutes and the form asks two qualifying questions. Without those two things it produces a full inbox and an empty schedule.
• Low-cost evaluation. The price does the screening. Fewer leads, each one already past the "is this worth money" question, and a visit that behaves like a first appointment rather than a sales call. Cost per lead goes up; cost per booked patient can hold, because far fewer leads fall out between the form and the chair.
• Full price from the ad. The cleanest leads and the fewest of them. It asks a cold stranger to trust a clinic they met thirty seconds ago. In my experience it only works for warm traffic: past patients, a reactivation list, a referral page. For cold Meta or Google traffic it is the offer most likely to make an owner say the ads don't work.

What I've seen in the ad accounts

The pattern that repeats: a clinic runs a free offer, the leads are the wrong age or never answer, and the owner wants to switch to a paid eval to fix it. Sometimes that is right. More often the free offer was fine and the form was the problem. Adding two qualifying questions, what are you dealing with and how soon do you want to fix it, costs more per lead and brings more intent, and it is a cheaper fix than changing the whole offer and resetting the campaign's learning.

The second pattern is the owner who changes the offer, the audience and the creative in the same week and then can't tell which change did what. One audience, one offer, one channel, and one variable at a time. If you move from free to paid, leave everything else alone for two weeks so the number you see belongs to the offer.

How to choose for your clinic

Start with follow-up, not price. If nobody can call a new lead back within a few minutes while you are treating, and you don't have software doing it, run the paid eval. It protects your time because the price filters before the lead reaches you. If you have fast follow-up, automated or human, run the free discovery call with two qualifying questions and let volume work for you; the booked-appointment number above is the one to watch, not the cost per lead.

Full price belongs on the back of the funnel. Reactivation campaigns, past-patient email, and anyone who has already met you can be sent straight to a full visit. Cold traffic should not.

On whether prices belong on your website: if you charge for the eval, put that price where the ad sends people. A price-shopper who sees it and leaves saved you a call. The price of the plan of care can wait for the evaluation, because by then they have a diagnosis and a reason. Clinic MarketingOS has a fuller breakdown of how cash clinics structure their pricing at cash-based physical therapy pricing.

Run it like a program, not a guess

Pick one offer, write down the cost per booked patient you will accept before launch, and give it two weeks and enough spend to produce a real sample. If the number comes in under your limit, add budget before you touch anything else. If it comes in over, change the form first, the creative second, and the offer last. The clinics that get this right are not the ones with the cleverest offer. They are the ones who changed one thing, waited, and read the number.