Eliminate Meeting No-Shows With These 7 Tips

While this rate varies across industries, it’s certainly something that can be mitigated in order to save you time and ultimately protect your business’ bottom line. 

Here are some of our top tips for getting a much higher show rate after a meeting has been booked by an SDR and they have introduced you to the prospect to host the meeting:

Show them that you are a real person

It is easier to have an SDR book the call on a Calendly link and have the process automated, but it’s much easier for the prospect to ghost you if they haven’t had any real interaction with you. We strongly recommend that you send a calendar invite yourself, along with an email to introduce yourself and put a face to a name (i.e. make it real) - more on this below.

Don’t delay when sending the calendar invite

If the prospect has agreed to a certain day and time and the SDR has made the introduction via email, it is critical to send the calendar invite immediately. This should never spill over to the next day - when it does, the chances of them accepting that invite plummet as they might have a conflict booking by then, or might just lose interest.

Confirm this via email and introduce yourself 

It is not enough to simply send a calendar invite and hope that the prospect is going to care about it. It is incredibly important to reply to the email where you were introduced at the same time as you send the calendar invite (we always prepare the invite and write the email in parallel so we can press send on both at the same time). Your email should confirm in text precisely what day, date, time and timezone you have sent the invite for, along with what video conferencing software will be used.

Obviously, all of this information is available in the calendar invite, but it is always safest to assume that everyone is an idiot and aim to preempt any questions or uncertainty they might have.

Give them a reason to be curious coming to the call

When you are sending the above email confirming the dates, adding one sentence about why you are looking forward to the call that is bespoke to them is very powerful. For example, you could mention that you saw that they were doing XYZ on their website and you think they will be very interested in the use case that you had with X client, and how you will talk them through it on the call.

This requires you to spend a few minutes doing some research on them to find something relevant, but it is worth it. Not only will this reduce the no-show rate, but they are far more likely to arrive to the meeting engaged and ready to listen.

It is difficult and expensive to get a prospect to this stage, spending a few extra minutes going the extra mile to ensure that they attend is always worth it.

Send a refresher email for meetings scheduled one week or more out

If you have to schedule a meeting a week or more in advance, it's essential to send a refresher email the day before the meeting. This will remind your prospect of why they wanted to take the meeting in the first place. If you go radio silent for a week or two, there's a good chance that they'll forget about the meeting and not show up.

Send a follow-up email if your prospect doesn't accept the invite

If your prospect doesn't accept the invite, send them an email saying something like, "Hey, I saw you hadn't accepted the invite, and I wanted to make sure it didn't go to spam. Let me know, and I can send it to you again." This is a better approach than asking if the time still works, as it serves as a friendly reminder that they need to accept the invite.

Send an email after five minutes if they don’t show

Finally, if you are waiting on the call and there has been no sign of life, wait for five minutes after the scheduled start time and send an email asking if they are still okay to join. This email should include the meeting link in case the prospect has trouble finding the link elsewhere. Something simple along the lines of:

RE: Today’s Call

Hey {First Name},

Are you still okay to join this call? The Zoom URL is here if you are having any issues with the invite.

I’ll hang on the line for another five minutes or so. Hope to catch up :)

Best,

NAME.

It's not always easy to get prospects to attend their scheduled meetings. However, by implementing the strategies discussed in this post, you can improve your show rate and make your meetings more productive and fruitful. Keep in mind that you invest significant effort and cost in getting these meetings on the calendar, so it's crucial to put in just as much effort to ensure that your prospects show up.