A prospect you'd never take on just booked a consult.
pepline answers scope, fit and fee ranges before anyone books, and hands you a qualified prospect with their situation already laid out: entity, size, what they need, when.
Set up from your services, your criteria, your voice.
Prospects switch firms in the weeks you can least afford to triage them.
Nobody shops for an accountant in a quiet month. They come when year-end is close, when the company is being created, when their current firm went silent.
Your site meets them with a form, the form lands in an inbox you'll clear after the deadline, and by then they've signed with whoever answered.
Answer the fit question the moment they ask it.
The agent answers whether you take clients like them, what an engagement covers, and a range from your fee logic. Then it routes on your criteria: service, entity type, size, timing.
Fits book the consult with a brief already written. The rest get a straight answer and a pointer elsewhere, and never cost you a deadline-week hour.
You've already thought of reasons this won't work.
“I want to speak to every prospect myself.”
You still do, with the ones who fit. The agent absorbs the "do you do X, how much" that ends a third of consults early anyway, and books the rest with a brief in hand.
“Pricing depends on the client.”
Exactly: it never quotes. It talks in the ranges you publish, gathers what you need to scope properly, and never pretends to be an engagement letter. You approve the voice.
“What about tax advice?”
Never. The agent gives no tax or legal advice: it scopes the need, answers about your firm and your services, and leaves the advice where it belongs, in the consult.
Live before your next request.
Point it at your services and fee logic. Review what it learned.
Flow, criteria, voice: yours, approved before the first conversation.
The widget goes where the contact form sits.
A consult hour is a client hour.
Spent on a wrong-fit stranger, it doesn't come back. Filter first, and the calendar fills with people you'd actually sign.