CIENCE vs Martal Group, October 2026: one prints its SDR rates, one quotes on a call and starts with a 3-month pilot. What a dry month costs at each.
By Moe Alhosni, founder of ROI Maximizer. Published 14 October 2026.
Short answer: CIENCE vs Martal Group is a choice between two ways of renting sales capacity. CIENCE publishes its rate card: $2,000 a month for the campaign team, $499 for the platform, and SDRs starting at $1,750 offshore and $4,500 in the US, each a month, month to month. Martal publishes no price, puts every outbound tier on a pilot of three months or more, and runs email, LinkedIn and calls with a team it calls onshore. Both bill you in a month with zero meetings.
I run a pay-per-meeting agency, so I compete with both. Read this with that in mind. Every figure below comes from the two companies' own pages or from review sites I read on 14 October 2026, linked where it appears. Where they publish nothing, I say so.
CIENCE sells SDRs by the seat. Its pricing page lists the $2,000 campaign team, a $499 graph8 licence with 75,000 credits, and SDRs per person per month: offshore from $1,750, Europe from $2,500, US from $4,500. Each SDR has a monthly held-meeting target and earns a bonus, billed to you, when they hit it. Setup is quoted on the call. Their worked example, five offshore SDRs, is $11,249 a month before bonus and setup.
That page has just changed. On 13 October it showed a $5,000 setup, offshore SDRs from $1,500, $1,000 onboarding per SDR and an unpriced per-meeting fee, as I recorded in CIENCE pricing. By 14 October all four had changed or gone. The order form is the price.
Martal sells a team. Its pricing page has three tiers and no numbers. Tier 1A, outbound lead generation, is a 3-month pilot, then a monthly subscription at a flat fee. Tiers 2 and 3 add a sales commission and a 4-month pilot. The homepage claims 200+ onshore sales executives, split 60% US, 20% Canada, 10% EU and 10% LATAM. Its industry list leans on tech: software, MSP, SaaS, cybersecurity, fintech.
| What to compare | CIENCE | Martal Group | Pay per qualified meeting (us) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Channels | Calls, email and messages from each SDR every working day; LinkedIn set up at launch (pricing, as of Oct 2026) | Email, LinkedIn and calls. An average month is 9,000–12,000 emails, 250–450 calls and 600–700 LinkedIn follow-ups (homepage, as of Oct 2026) | Cold email |
| Pricing model | $2,000 team + $499 platform + per-SDR fee from $1,750 (offshore) or $4,500 (US) a month, bonus at target, setup quoted | Flat monthly fee, quote only; commission added on Tiers 2 and 3 (pricing, as of Oct 2026) | Per-meeting option: setup $1,000–$3,000, then $200–$500 per qualified meeting, billed monthly in arrears. Retainer option: $5,000 a month flat, no per-meeting fee. Where in each range depends on deal size, reach and list difficulty; exact figures confirmed on the call. Terms: pay-per-meeting lead generation pricing |
| Minimum term | Month to month | 3-month pilot on Tier 1A, 4-month on Tiers 2 and 3, then monthly | Per-meeting option: no minimum spend. Retainer: ask for the term in writing |
| What is guaranteed | Nothing on the pricing page | Nothing published. The 20–30 qualified leads and 5–15 "flipped leads" a month are labelled an average | Nothing. On the per-meeting option you pay only for meetings that took place and you approved against a definition agreed in writing before outreach; nothing for a no-show. The retainer bills in a month with no meetings |
| Ramp time | Live in 14 days, per its pricing page | Most engagements produce qualified leads within 30 days, per Martal on its Clutch profile | PR Noir: 10 meetings in the first 30 days. One client, not a promise |
| Who it suits | My read: teams that want SDR seats, phone included, added or dropped monthly | My read: tech and SaaS firms entering North America with budget for a pilot | Agencies and B2B SaaS that know their deal size and cannot fund a dry month |
Neither pricing page answers the question that matters: what do I owe in a month with zero held meetings?
At CIENCE the arithmetic is public. One offshore SDR is $4,249 a month: $2,000, plus $499, plus $1,750. The bonus pays nothing below 60% of target, so a zero month costs at least that, plus setup in month one. One US SDR is $6,999. At 100% of target the bonus adds 70% of base: $1,225 on a $1,750 seat.
At Martal you owe the flat fee, for at least three months, and Martal will not print it. CIENCE prints one for them. Its own CIENCE vs Martal Group page, marked updated March 2026, puts Martal at $4,000 to $12,000 a month with a 3-month minimum. That is a competitor's estimate, and the same page's channel row for Martal leaves out the phone, when Martal's pricing page puts calls in every outbound tier. If the range is right, the pilot commits you to $12,000–$36,000 before you can walk.
The nearest thing to a Martal price is in its ROI calculator. By my reading of the script behind the calculator on its pricing page, it assumes a cost of $6,200 a month for up to 10 appointments a month, $74,400 a year, plus $620 a month for every appointment above ten. Its "ROI" is projected revenue divided by that cost, so anything under 100% is a loss. Move the slider to five appointments a month, with the other sliders at their defaults, and it reports $50,000 of annual revenue and 73% ROI. That is revenue below cost, shown as a positive return.
Martal's homepage case studies supply meeting counts. Its digital marketing agency campaign booked 27 meetings in 7.5 months. Martal does not say what that client paid. At the calculator's $6,200 a month, that is about $1,700 per booked meeting. At CIENCE's $4,000–$12,000 estimate, $1,100 to $3,300.
None of this makes either a bad buy. It is what a retainer is; the trade is laid out in pay-per-meeting vs retainer lead generation.
As of October 2026, Martal has 4.8 from 109 reviews on Clutch, most common project size $10,000–$49,999. Read the critical ones. A director at a software development company gave one star on 7 June 2022: "We didn't get a single lead in this project." A partner at an IT services company gave two stars on 25 January 2025, after a year-long engagement: "No appointments were scheduled." A general manager at a manufacturer gave four stars on 1 August 2024, with this complaint: "The team started with 1–2 appointments a week, then it tapered off." Trustpilot has two Martal reviews as of October 2026, too few to read anything into.
As of October 2026, CIENCE has 4.2 from 142 reviews on Clutch, on a profile CIENCE has not claimed, with the same most common project size. On Trustpilot it has 1.6 from 21 reviews as of October 2026, 95% of them one star. A Finnish genomics software company wrote in July 2022 that the sales process promised 10 to 12 qualified meetings a month: "The reality was 0,5 per month." Andrew Morgan, reviewing from the UK on 8 September 2026, wrote: "We paid $20k and they didn't generate a single lead."
G2 would not load for me past a verification wall, so nothing from it is here. The bad reviews on both sides share one thing: months paid for with nothing booked. That is the risk a retainer puts on you.
You want SDR seats you can add and drop each month, and phone matters. CIENCE. The price is public, the term is month to month, and offshore seats are the cheapest capacity here. Read the Trustpilot reviews and meet your SDR before you sign.
You are a tech or SaaS company entering North America and want onshore reps across email, LinkedIn and calls. Martal. A 4.8 over 109 Clutch reviews is a strong record. Budget for three months at a price you will only hear on the call, and ask what 20–30 qualified leads a month means in held meetings.
You are an agency or a B2B SaaS, you know your deal size, and a month with no meetings would hurt. Pay per qualified meeting. PR Noir, a US PR agency, got 27 leads, 10 meetings, 37% lead-to-meeting and a $90K close in its first 30 days with us, written up in PR Noir's first 30 days. P1 Communications, a UK hospitality PR agency, got 20+ qualified meetings, half moved to commercial discussions, 4 new deals and £12K a month in projected pipeline. Of 1,543 positive replies across our own and client campaigns, August 2025 to July 2026, 19.4% came from B2B PR agency campaigns, 13.5% from UK hospitality PR and 9.2% from B2B SaaS. That is where we are strong; appointment setting for marketing agencies goes further.
We run cold email. If your buyers have to be phoned, CIENCE or Martal will serve you better. If your market is a few hundred companies, per-meeting pricing rewards volume you cannot afford to burn. If your deal is worth under roughly $5,000 a year, we will turn you down. If you have never closed a deal from outbound, no pricing model fixes the offer; run the free GTM teardown first. If you would rather run reps yourself, in-house SDR vs pay-per-result agency cost does the maths.
Wider shortlist: Belkins vs Martal Group, SalesHive vs CIENCE, Martal Group pricing, Belkins vs SalesHive. Run how to tell if a lead generation agency is any good against every name on it, ours included.
Get four things in writing:
Our own definition is set out line by line at what counts as a qualified meeting. Before you accept any quote, from CIENCE, Martal or us, put your deal size into the ROI calculator to find the most you should pay per meeting.
Or run the free GTM teardown on your own site for the ICP, cold email and numbers specific to your company.