Get Prospects to Show Up, On Time, Every Time

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: for those in the trenches of sales development, there are few things better than booking a top-shelf meeting.

You found a company, and a prospect, that you knew you could help. You prospected. You educated. You sold. And you got them.

It was a good day.

But that excitement can be fleeting – especially when that perfect meeting, that company-defining meeting, doesn’t happen. The prospect doesn’t show, and they don’t reschedule. They’re just…gone.

Sigh.

Of course, you might be thinking, no-shows happen. People get busy. People forget. Priorities change, sometimes on a dime. It’s all part of the gig.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t easy and effective steps we can take as sales development professionals to limit no-shows. In fact, a few tweaks to your scheduling routine can produce a dramatic increase in meeting attendance.

And that’s what we want, right?

“When we have more conversations, we trade more stories, and eventually we come out ahead,” says Christopher Fago, Cloud Security Specialist at RedLock, on recent edition of The Predictable Revenue Podcast.

“We come out ahead in opportunities, and we come out ahead in deals.”

Fago’s process

No matter how we try and spin it, the truth is we rarely rank at the top of our prospect’s priority list. Like us, they’re juggling responsibilities, and buying something (spending company money) is an easy task to drop down the list.

So, to ensure prospect’s make it to discovery calls, Fago has developed a short, but consistent cadence for scheduling meetings. Once a prospect agrees to a meeting, Fago sets up three distinct emails:

An email thanking the prospect for agreeing to take the meeting. In this email, he reminds the prospect of the day and time they’ve agreed on, and mentions he will send a calendar invite along ASAP to confirm. A critical consideration here is to book the meeting as soon as possible. The further out you schedule the meeting, the greater a chance a prospect forgets, or changes their mind.
The calendar invite. Included in the calendar invite is the meeting URL, and any agenda items he feels will help structure / frame the call.
A day or two before the scheduled meeting (the previous Friday, if the meeting is booked on a Monday), Fago sends along another note detailing the agenda items for the upcoming call. He also asks the prospect if they wish to add anything to the agenda. The subject line for this email is key – Fago opts for a simple “Confirming,” to catch the prospect’s attention, and prompt them to respond. It also gives prospects valuable context for the meeting, which they can forward along to their colleagues, in case other team members will be sitting in on the call. Lastly, if a prospect has to reschedule, this email gives them the opportunity to do so.

“A enterprise deal takes like 8 people to get done,” adds Fago.

“If there is 8 people on my call, and I only send the invite to one person, it’s nice to give the person you invite more stuff to send along to the other people internally. It really helps.”

Fago’s numbers

So far, Fago’s simple booking cadence has worked wonders. Last year, Fago booked, and held, 88 meetings in just 190 workdays (Fago started with RedLock in June). That’s setting up a new conversation, basically, every other day.

“Back in June, it was all about having those conversations,” says Fago.

“It was about discussing what we do, and learning what they are doing.”

This year, Fago’s numbers are even more impressive. Thus far, he’s booked 59 meetings in 74 business days, including time off.

That’s nearly a meeting per day – Fago’s goal for 2018.

More follow ups

After the initial discovery call, led by Fago, another call will be booked with a solutions engineer, if necessary. That call is a more technical demo, where RedLock can give prospects a detailed look under the hood.

To be sure, RedLock isn’t the only company that structure it’s calls and demos as such (discovery call first, technical demo second). But their decision to do so, at least first, actually came from a lack of resources.

For example, when Fago started RedLock only had solution engineers based on the west coast. Fago, on the hand, was based across the country, in Atlanta. Because of the time difference, scheduling an hour-long comprehensive demo (discovery and technical demo) on the first call could be difficult, depending on the schedules of the solutions engineers.

So, instead of losing out on potentially great calls, Fago and the team decided to split the calls into two 30 minute sessions. The first call, led by Fago, would cover all of the typical discovery call staples – are we a fit? – and include a sales focused deck. If the discovery call went well, they would then schedule the technical demo where the solutions engineers could focus solely on the product.

And, as luck would have it, what started as a response to resources and times zones proved to be great journey for the prospect.

“It worked out for the customer. We had 30 minutes, and we would go through the agenda we established,” says Fago.

“And I would also add the fact that can use the first call to schedule a deeper dive later, so that way I don’t have to show those 10 – 15 slides again. It really is customer first.”ˆ

For more of Fago’s thoughts on scheduling, and prospecting, check out his appearance on The Predictable Revenue Podcast.