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Route and schedule prospects from bizdev to sales to implementation
It’s 11:12am. You’re staring blankly at yourself in the Zoom window wondering where it all went wrong. You have been no-showed yet again.
No-shows are brutal for sales teams: lost productivity, hurt morale, missed new pipeline.
So how can we handle them and keep our show rates high?
You know the old saying: “Prevention is better than a cure.”
That applies especially to no-shows.
So before we get into what to do if you get no-showed, let’s talk about some strategies to ensure we’re setting ourselves up for the highest likelihood of a buyer showing up to a booked meeting.
When you book meetings, ensure you’re not booking them too far in the future.
If anything, ensure you’re using strategies to push the buyer to book a meeting as soon as possible.
Set up your booking link so that meetings can’t be booked out too far.
When suggesting times to meet with a prospect via cold call, email, or social, only provide days and times within the next week.
Some prospects won’t be able to accommodate that and that’s fine, but make meetings booked further out an exception.
The longer the time between when the meeting is booked and when it takes place, the greater the likelihood the prospect forgets, loses interest, has other priorities come up, or even departs the company.
There’s data that shows a direct correlation between show rates going down and the meeting occurring further in the future.
If someone won’t agree to a meeting soon, it’s worth understanding why before agreeing to a meeting in a month.
Always book meetings with your buyer’s time zone and schedule in mind. Try not to make them too late or too early.
Also, avoid booking meetings at historically busy times. This will depend on who you sell to, but booking meetings first thing on a Monday morning or last thing on a Friday afternoon is a recipe for a meeting to be rescheduled or no-showed.
It’s tempting to book a meeting with anyone marginally willing to get on a call with you. But there are cases, especially when cold calling, where a prospect will agree to meet with you just to get a seller off the phone.
Being too pushy, not asking questions, or not understanding if the customer has a need will increase the chances of someone no-showing.
Ensure that when you book a meeting, it’s something that’s going to be of benefit to the prospect. Sending off calendar invites to just about anyone is a sure way to increase your no-show rate.
Once you book a meeting, always send a calendar invite.
Use this formula for the title: {your_company} + {their_company} {topic_of_call}
This way they can see your company before theirs and recognize what the meeting is.
Within the body of the invite, include an agenda that includes the:
Also, invite them to add to the agenda by saying, “Let me know if there’s anything you’d like to add!” This will help them feel heard and encourage engagement prior to the meeting.
Follow this all with a note saying, “If this time doesn’t work, email me here and we can find another time. Alternatively, pick a new time in my calendar here.”
If you have the option to do so, also include a rescheduling link in the invite. This makes it convenient for the buyer to rebook if something comes up. Chili Piper even lets you mark no-shows in your calendar and automate cadences to reach out and reschedule to put second chances on autopilot.
After you have sent the calendar invite, send a similar confirmation email to the prospect and cc anyone else who will be attending that meeting.
This should include:
Since many meetings are booked on behalf of a senior seller, the buyer often hasn’t engaged with the seller they’re actually meeting with.
This means they feel no emotional obligation to the person they’re meeting and are unlikely to feel guilty for no-showing.
To overcome this, a personalized introduction email (or even better, a video) can go a long way.
You want to show that the seller has done research, any notes have been passed along, and make sure the buyer knows you’re a friendly human being.
So record a Vidyard or send an email with a message like this one:
“Hey {name}, my name’s {name}, I’m the rep you’ll be meeting with on {day} at {time}. The agenda for that meeting is {agenda point 1} and {agenda point 2}. It’ll be {attendees} on the call. Let me know if you’d like to add anything to that agenda or if you think it’d help to have anyone else join. If not, though, look forward to chatting on {day}.”
If the calendar invite isn’t accepted, then the meeting likely isn’t going to happen. They may have missed it, so try this to spur them on to accept the invite:
Edit the title of the calendar invite, add the words (Please Confirm:) to the beginning of the invite, and resend the updated invitation to all attendees.
This should spur them on to accept the invite. If they don’t, it’s worth sending them another email and/or giving them a call to make sure they got the invite and that the meeting is taking place.
I’m not a big believer in multiple auto-reminders, but I do find sending one the day before and the day of the meeting to be effective.
It can be as simple as:
"This is an automated reminder that we have a meeting scheduled tomorrow/today at {time} to discuss {agenda}. Speak soon!"
Automated meeting reminders helped Chili Piper achieve an outbound no-show rate of less than 5%. For context, the standard no-show rate in sales is 20%.
Finally, this is a GOLDEN rule: a larger team should never be the one to reschedule a meeting with a customer. This frustrates them, looks unprofessional, and reduces their chances of attending the new meeting.
If the buyer is looking at multiple vendors, this immediately puts you in bad favor and at a disadvantage.
Ensure that you and the other members of your team are blocking their calendars correctly to avoid scheduling conflicts.
My old VP of Sales had a rule: If you can’t make a booked inbound new business meeting, another seller gets it instead.
Ok, so you did all that prep work and yet they still didn’t show… Those bastards!!!
Many sellers get passive-aggressive when this happens, but making someone feel guilty decreases the chances of them getting back to you.
So instead, follow this cadence to avoid guilt tripping and ensure the buyer doesn’t feel judged.
After 5 minutes have elapsed, send a friendly email to the prospect resharing the link to join the meeting.
Something as simple as:
“On our meeting here - {meeting_link} 😊”
Chili Piper’s one-click booking via email will make it easy for them to reschedule.
After another 5 minutes have passed, you can give the prospect a call (if their number is available to you).
If they pick up, you can say, “Hey {name}, hope you don’t mind the buzz. We had a meeting scheduled at {time} to discuss {topic}. Are we still on?”
If they don’t pick up, you can leave a similar-sounding voicemail.
There’s still a chance the prospect will join. I’ve had buyers show up with 5 minutes to spare apologetically wanting to reschedule.
Keep the virtual meeting open and get on with some other tasks like updating the CRM or sending follow-up emails.
It’s important that the tone of this email does not seem passive-aggressive, as mentioned before this will only make the buyer less likely to come back around.
Instead, lead with empathy, as you never know what could’ve happened in their world.
A simple email framework I’ve used in response to my initial confirmation email:
“Hey {name},
We had a meeting scheduled for today at {time}.
Seems like something must have come up. Hope everything is OK. Let me know if that’s something you’d like to rebook.”
Chili Piper will also track no-shows, reschedules, and any other details in your CRM in real-time so you have less manual work or follow-ups to do.
One simple thing you can try to do to get the meeting back on track is to move the invite or send a new invite for a different time within the next couple of days.
This makes it easy for the prospect to say “yes” or “no” rather than take the time to look through their calendar to find another time.
I’ve been judged for this take before, but if a buyer agrees to a meeting, accepts the invite, doesn’t show, ignores all my emails, calls, invites, and voicemails…
I’ll move on.
There are better prospects for me to be chasing, and if there is desire from the prospect, they’ll come back around and find a way to reply to my messages.
If they don’t respond after all that, I can safely assume they’re not interested and don’t want to deal with the emotional toll of telling me.
In short, don’t waste too much time on a lead who’s clearly not interested.
Need more help avoiding ghosting? Chili Piper has 8 simple tricks you can use to improve your show rates.
It’s 11:12am. You’re staring blankly at yourself in the Zoom window wondering where it all went wrong. You have been no-showed yet again.
No-shows are brutal for sales teams: lost productivity, hurt morale, missed new pipeline.
So how can we handle them and keep our show rates high?
You know the old saying: “Prevention is better than a cure.”
That applies especially to no-shows.
So before we get into what to do if you get no-showed, let’s talk about some strategies to ensure we’re setting ourselves up for the highest likelihood of a buyer showing up to a booked meeting.
When you book meetings, ensure you’re not booking them too far in the future.
If anything, ensure you’re using strategies to push the buyer to book a meeting as soon as possible.
Set up your booking link so that meetings can’t be booked out too far.
When suggesting times to meet with a prospect via cold call, email, or social, only provide days and times within the next week.
Some prospects won’t be able to accommodate that and that’s fine, but make meetings booked further out an exception.
The longer the time between when the meeting is booked and when it takes place, the greater the likelihood the prospect forgets, loses interest, has other priorities come up, or even departs the company.
There’s data that shows a direct correlation between show rates going down and the meeting occurring further in the future.
If someone won’t agree to a meeting soon, it’s worth understanding why before agreeing to a meeting in a month.
Always book meetings with your buyer’s time zone and schedule in mind. Try not to make them too late or too early.
Also, avoid booking meetings at historically busy times. This will depend on who you sell to, but booking meetings first thing on a Monday morning or last thing on a Friday afternoon is a recipe for a meeting to be rescheduled or no-showed.
It’s tempting to book a meeting with anyone marginally willing to get on a call with you. But there are cases, especially when cold calling, where a prospect will agree to meet with you just to get a seller off the phone.
Being too pushy, not asking questions, or not understanding if the customer has a need will increase the chances of someone no-showing.
Ensure that when you book a meeting, it’s something that’s going to be of benefit to the prospect. Sending off calendar invites to just about anyone is a sure way to increase your no-show rate.
Once you book a meeting, always send a calendar invite.
Use this formula for the title: {your_company} + {their_company} {topic_of_call}
This way they can see your company before theirs and recognize what the meeting is.
Within the body of the invite, include an agenda that includes the:
Also, invite them to add to the agenda by saying, “Let me know if there’s anything you’d like to add!” This will help them feel heard and encourage engagement prior to the meeting.
Follow this all with a note saying, “If this time doesn’t work, email me here and we can find another time. Alternatively, pick a new time in my calendar here.”
If you have the option to do so, also include a rescheduling link in the invite. This makes it convenient for the buyer to rebook if something comes up. Chili Piper even lets you mark no-shows in your calendar and automate cadences to reach out and reschedule to put second chances on autopilot.
After you have sent the calendar invite, send a similar confirmation email to the prospect and cc anyone else who will be attending that meeting.
This should include:
Since many meetings are booked on behalf of a senior seller, the buyer often hasn’t engaged with the seller they’re actually meeting with.
This means they feel no emotional obligation to the person they’re meeting and are unlikely to feel guilty for no-showing.
To overcome this, a personalized introduction email (or even better, a video) can go a long way.
You want to show that the seller has done research, any notes have been passed along, and make sure the buyer knows you’re a friendly human being.
So record a Vidyard or send an email with a message like this one:
“Hey {name}, my name’s {name}, I’m the rep you’ll be meeting with on {day} at {time}. The agenda for that meeting is {agenda point 1} and {agenda point 2}. It’ll be {attendees} on the call. Let me know if you’d like to add anything to that agenda or if you think it’d help to have anyone else join. If not, though, look forward to chatting on {day}.”
If the calendar invite isn’t accepted, then the meeting likely isn’t going to happen. They may have missed it, so try this to spur them on to accept the invite:
Edit the title of the calendar invite, add the words (Please Confirm:) to the beginning of the invite, and resend the updated invitation to all attendees.
This should spur them on to accept the invite. If they don’t, it’s worth sending them another email and/or giving them a call to make sure they got the invite and that the meeting is taking place.
I’m not a big believer in multiple auto-reminders, but I do find sending one the day before and the day of the meeting to be effective.
It can be as simple as:
"This is an automated reminder that we have a meeting scheduled tomorrow/today at {time} to discuss {agenda}. Speak soon!"
Automated meeting reminders helped Chili Piper achieve an outbound no-show rate of less than 5%. For context, the standard no-show rate in sales is 20%.
Finally, this is a GOLDEN rule: a larger team should never be the one to reschedule a meeting with a customer. This frustrates them, looks unprofessional, and reduces their chances of attending the new meeting.
If the buyer is looking at multiple vendors, this immediately puts you in bad favor and at a disadvantage.
Ensure that you and the other members of your team are blocking their calendars correctly to avoid scheduling conflicts.
My old VP of Sales had a rule: If you can’t make a booked inbound new business meeting, another seller gets it instead.
Ok, so you did all that prep work and yet they still didn’t show… Those bastards!!!
Many sellers get passive-aggressive when this happens, but making someone feel guilty decreases the chances of them getting back to you.
So instead, follow this cadence to avoid guilt tripping and ensure the buyer doesn’t feel judged.
After 5 minutes have elapsed, send a friendly email to the prospect resharing the link to join the meeting.
Something as simple as:
“On our meeting here - {meeting_link} 😊”
Chili Piper’s one-click booking via email will make it easy for them to reschedule.
After another 5 minutes have passed, you can give the prospect a call (if their number is available to you).
If they pick up, you can say, “Hey {name}, hope you don’t mind the buzz. We had a meeting scheduled at {time} to discuss {topic}. Are we still on?”
If they don’t pick up, you can leave a similar-sounding voicemail.
There’s still a chance the prospect will join. I’ve had buyers show up with 5 minutes to spare apologetically wanting to reschedule.
Keep the virtual meeting open and get on with some other tasks like updating the CRM or sending follow-up emails.
It’s important that the tone of this email does not seem passive-aggressive, as mentioned before this will only make the buyer less likely to come back around.
Instead, lead with empathy, as you never know what could’ve happened in their world.
A simple email framework I’ve used in response to my initial confirmation email:
“Hey {name},
We had a meeting scheduled for today at {time}.
Seems like something must have come up. Hope everything is OK. Let me know if that’s something you’d like to rebook.”
Chili Piper will also track no-shows, reschedules, and any other details in your CRM in real-time so you have less manual work or follow-ups to do.
One simple thing you can try to do to get the meeting back on track is to move the invite or send a new invite for a different time within the next couple of days.
This makes it easy for the prospect to say “yes” or “no” rather than take the time to look through their calendar to find another time.
I’ve been judged for this take before, but if a buyer agrees to a meeting, accepts the invite, doesn’t show, ignores all my emails, calls, invites, and voicemails…
I’ll move on.
There are better prospects for me to be chasing, and if there is desire from the prospect, they’ll come back around and find a way to reply to my messages.
If they don’t respond after all that, I can safely assume they’re not interested and don’t want to deal with the emotional toll of telling me.
In short, don’t waste too much time on a lead who’s clearly not interested.
Need more help avoiding ghosting? Chili Piper has 8 simple tricks you can use to improve your show rates.
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