Nobody publishes the middle step. Recruiting pages quote one person’s best month, salary sites average four job titles into one meaningless number, and the arithmetic that connects them is left out of both. This page puts it back: booked calls times show rate gives held calls, held calls times close rate gives closes, closes times commission gives the cheque.
Pick which of the four seats you are in or thinking about, set the call volume and the rates to your own, and read the band. Every rate this page starts with is an editable assumption, marked as one next to the field, and the output is deliberately a range rather than one confident number. High-ticket sales genuinely pays more than most jobs available to somebody with no degree and no capital. It is also skill work attached to someone else’s offer, and both halves of that sentence decide what you make.
What this calculates
- Monthly and annual gross in three scenarios, because one number would be a lie.
- Closes a month, and income per call or dial — the second one is usually the number that changes minds about a lead source.
- Hours a week the plan implies, counting call time and call admin only.
- The plain line: how many closes a month at what value it takes to hit the income you actually want.
- The vending bridge — what happens if a slice of that commission buys machines instead of sitting in a checking account.
None of the defaults here are industry facts. They are starting points so the arithmetic has somewhere to begin, and every one of them is yours to overwrite. Nothing on this page is an earnings claim, a typical-results statement, or a promise about what you will make.
The defaults, published in full
Every cell is an editable assumption and not an industry fact. They exist so the arithmetic has a starting point, and the page works properly only once you have replaced them with your own.
| Seat | Default traffic | Activity | Show or contact rate | Close rate | Offer or premium | How you get paid |
|---|
| Commission-only high-ticket closer | Inbound booked calls | 5 booked calls/day | 65% | 20% | $5,000 | 10% of the offer price |
| Salary plus commission (corporate or SaaS AE) | Inbound booked calls | 4 scheduled calls/day | 70% | 5% | $18,000 | 8% of contract value, $60,000 base, +15% past quota |
| Insurance agent (volume and dials) | Outbound dials | 100 dials/day | 5% | 8% | $1,800 | 65% of first-year premium plus 5% renewals |
| Appointment setter | Outbound dials | 3 booked appointments/day | 65% | 18% | $5,000 | $100 per show plus 3% of a closed deal |
Switching the traffic type moves both rates, because where a call comes from changes them more than anything else you can do. Inbound booked calls show at roughly 60 to 80 percent and close somewhere in the 15 to 30 percent band on a good offer. Cold outbound moves the volume up and both rates down, often by a lot. Warm referrals are the best rates and the smallest volume, which is why nobody builds a business on them alone.
Commission-only vs salary plus commission
Commission-only means you eat what you kill. No base, no floor, and in most closer seats no benefits either, because you are a 1099 contractor rather than an employee. The trade is a bigger percentage: eight to fifteen percent of a $3,000 to $10,000 offer is the usual band, and nobody caps you at quota.
Salary plus commission is the corporate version of the same job. A mid-market account executive might carry a $60,000 to $80,000 base against a $110,000 to $160,000 on-target number, so roughly half the pay is variable and the other half arrives on the fifteenth regardless. Accelerators raise the rate on revenue past quota, which is where the people who beat their number make most of their money.
Which is better depends on a question the recruiting content skips: how many months of expenses do you have banked? Commission-only with six months of runway is a bet you can survive losing. Commission-only with three weeks of runway is a countdown, and buyers can hear it. Most people who wash out of a commission-only seat leave in month two or three, before a pipeline has had time to fill, and they leave for financial reasons rather than skill ones.
Why high-ticket pays more and why most people do not make it
The percentage is bigger because the sale is harder and the margin is fatter. Ten percent of a $6,000 coaching program is $600 for one conversation, and nothing in retail or in most salaried work pays that for an hour. That part is real.
The part the ads leave out is that you are selling someone else’s offer to leads someone else generated, and both of those set your ceiling. If the offer does not deliver, refunds climb and the lead source eventually dies. If the traffic is bad, your close rate can be excellent and your income still awful, because the calculator above multiplies your rate by a volume you were handed. Ask about refund rate and about where the calls come from before you ask about commission percentage. Those two answers are worth more than five points of split.
The skill half is real too, and it takes longer than the courses suggest. Reading a call, holding a price, handling the four objections that are actually money objections in disguise. Move the close rate slider from 15 to 25 percent above and watch what happens to the annual number. That gap is a year or two of reps, not a weekend.
Insurance sales: volume, dials, bonuses
Insurance runs on a different engine. Instead of five booked calls a day you are making a hundred dials, and instead of a 65 percent show rate you have a contact rate in the single digits on cold or aged lists. Commission is a percentage of the first twelve months of premium, often advanced before the customer has paid it, and the percentages are large: 50 to 90 percent of first-year premium is a normal range depending on product and contract level.
Two things get left out of nearly every recruiting pitch, and the calculator flags both. The first is lead cost, which comes out of your side and can be most of a slow month. The second is chargebacks: when a policy lapses inside the first year the advance is clawed back out of your next cheque, so a good month written on shaky persistency turns into a bad one ninety days later. Renewals are the reason people stay. They are small per policy and they compound, and an agent with a decade-old book earns on work they did in 2016.
Setter vs closer
Setting is the honest entry point. You book the calls, somebody else runs them, and you get paid per booked call that shows plus a small slice of what closes. Fifty to a hundred and fifty dollars per show plus two to five percent of a closed deal is the common shape. Three booked calls a day that show at 65 percent is around forty shows a month, which is real money for a job you can learn in a month.
It is also the seat with the lowest ceiling, and the ceiling is not yours. Your back end depends entirely on how good the closer is and how good the offer is, and you cannot fix either. Most people who make setting work treat it as paid training: learn the offer, learn the objections, watch how the closer handles a price, and move up. Switch the calculator between the two seats with the same offer price and the gap is the whole argument.
The active-to-passive stack: sales income into vending
Sales income has one structural flaw. It stops when you stop. Take a month off, get sick, lose the account that was feeding you calls, and the number goes to zero that same month. The skill stays, which is worth a lot, but the income does not.
The two fit together because they fail in opposite directions. Sales pays well per hour and pays nothing the week you do not work. A route pays modestly per hour of attention and keeps paying while you are on a call. The sales skill set is also what makes the vending bet less risky than it looks, because placing machines is a walk-in sales job. Somebody who has held a price on a $6,000 offer is not going to be frightened of asking a facilities manager for a corner of a break room.
Use the bridge above rather than my numbers. Fifteen percent of $80,000 a year is $12,000, which at $3,500 a machine is three used combo units netting somewhere in the $450 to $1,200 a month band. That is not a replacement for a closing income. It is the start of income that does not depend on your calendar.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a high-ticket closer actually make?
It depends on four numbers and none of them are your work ethic: how many booked calls you get, how many of those show, what you close, and what the offer costs. Five booked calls a day at a 65 percent show rate and a 20 percent close rate on a $5,000 offer at 10 percent commission works out near $7,000 a month. Drop the close rate to 14 percent and it is under $4,000. Those are editable assumptions on this page, not industry facts, and the honest range for the same seat is wide enough that any single number quoted at you should be treated as marketing.
Is commission-only better than a base salary?
Commission-only pays a bigger percentage and has no ceiling. Salary plus commission pays about half of it no matter what happens in a given month. The deciding question is usually runway rather than upside: with six months of expenses banked, commission-only is a bet you can survive losing, and with three weeks banked it is a countdown that buyers can hear in your voice. Most people who wash out of commission-only roles do it in month two or three, before the pipeline has had time to fill.
How do insurance agents actually get paid?
Mostly as a percentage of the first twelve months of premium on each policy that issues, often advanced to you before the customer has paid it. On top of that sit renewals, typically a much smaller percentage of premium each year the policy stays in force, plus production bonuses from the carrier or the agency. Two costs are left out of nearly every recruiting pitch: what you pay for leads, and chargebacks when a policy lapses early and the advance is clawed back out of your next cheque.
Why would a salesperson put commission into vending machines?
Because sales income stops the month you stop selling, and a placed machine does not care whether you took calls that week. The two fit together rather than compete: sales pays well now and funds the equipment, machines pay less per dollar of effort but keep paying while you are on a call. It is not passive in the honest sense of the word. Somebody still drives to the location, still restocks it, and still handles the month a compressor dies. What it is, is income that no longer arrives only when you are talking.
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