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Hours to demo: how to compare a home show against a store setup

18 August 2026 · 6 min read

A home show costs $1,500 for the booth. A Saturday inside a Home Depot costs nothing. A farmers market costs $30. Which is the best use of your team?

You cannot answer that from the fees, and most companies pick by instinct — or by whichever event somebody enjoyed last year. There is one number that makes all three comparable.

The metric

Hours to demo = staffed hours ÷ appointments produced

How many hours of somebody standing at a table it takes to generate one appointment. Nothing else about an event is comparable across venues; this is.

A note on the name, because it trips people up. The metric is called hours to demo but it is measured in appointments set, not demos run. It is named for the outcome the appointment exists to produce. If you want the true hours-per-demo, divide by your demo rate — at a 70% demo rate, one hour to demo is really 1.4 hours per demo run.

Working benchmarks

The spread is not about traffic. It is about what fraction of that traffic is already thinking about the house.

Everyone walking past a home show booth came to that building to think about their home. A farmers market is the opposite — genuinely high foot traffic, almost none of it in a buying frame — which is why it takes three to five staffed hours to produce one appointment. Store hours sit in the middle for the obvious reason: the person is out shopping for the house, but they came for a specific item.

Treat these as starting points, then replace them with your own within a couple of months. The benchmarks tell you what to expect; your own numbers tell you what to book.

Turning it into money

Hours to demo plus your wage plus your space fee gives you cost per opportunity directly. At an $18 hourly wage — use your own:

Now the three are comparable, and the ranking is not the one the fees suggested. The $1,500 home show and the $30 farmers market land within $16 of each other per appointment. The free one wins outright.

For scale: a company at a $20,000 average sale running a 15% marketing budget can afford about $400 per set appointment. Every row above is a fraction of that. This is the entire argument for running events — not that they are cheap in absolute terms, but that staffed hours convert into appointments at a rate purchased leads cannot approach.

The cost that is not in the table

Major retailers take a percentage of the sale. Working a Home Depot, Lowe's, or a warehouse club floor normally means paying the retailer a cut of every job that comes off it, and it can run as high as 15%.

That never appears in a cost-per-opportunity calculation, and it changes the answer completely.

Run it through. That $45 labour CPO works out to about $336 per sold job, which on a $20,000 average sale is a 1.7% marketing cost — implausibly good, and the reason store programs get described as free leads. Add the 15% retail cut and the true figure is roughly 17%, against a 15% target.

The channel went from your cheapest to slightly over budget, and nothing in your reporting moved.

There are two honest ways to handle that, and doing neither is how companies lose money on the channel they believe is their best:

• Price store leads differently. If the cut is more than a couple of points, these leads need their own rate card, or fewer available discounts, so the retailer's share comes out of margin you planned for rather than margin you needed.
• Or accept a 17–20% marketing cost on store business and carry a lower average elsewhere. This is entirely legitimate — your marketing percentage is a blended figure, and a channel can sit above target as long as you chose it and something else sits below.

Either way, these leads are still worth the arrangement. Store customers close at high rates; they are serious buyers, already out shopping for the house, standing in front of a person. And the percentage usually applies only to the original sale — repeat business and referrals out of a store customer are normally yours outright, which means the real cost of the channel falls the longer you run it. Check your own agreement, then track store-originated referrals separately so you can watch it happen.

Track it by person, not just by venue

This is the part most companies skip, and it inverts conclusions.

Hours to demo is mostly a hiring outcome. The same booth, the same offer and the same Saturday will produce four appointments or twelve depending entirely on who is standing behind the table. A venue that looks weak in your data may be a scheduling problem — your two strongest people were at the home show that weekend and the market got whoever was left.

Track hours to demo by ambassador and by venue, and you can tell the difference between a bad event and a bad shift. One of those you stop booking. The other you fix.

And check what survives

Hours to demo counts appointments, so it can be gamed by anyone willing to write down a name and a phone number. Pair it with what actually ran.

A demonstrator who produces plenty of leads and few appointments that hold has cost you twice — once on the day, and again in the rep afternoons spent driving to appointments that were never going to run.