Our first large engagement in the Emirates was for a company selling speech analytics into hotels and hospitals. Every reservations desk and every patient booking line in the country already records its calls, for compliance, and almost none of them ever listen to the recordings. The product listens. It is an easy thing to explain.

It was not an easy thing to schedule. Somewhere in the second month one of our people put the position in a sentence that has been quoted inside this company ever since: for that campaign, we booked fifteen meetings in order to hold ten.

That ratio is not a failure

The instinct, when a third of your meetings evaporate, is to blame the booking. The rep oversold it. The prospect was never real. Confirm harder.

Sometimes that is true. In this case it was not. Front-office directors in hospitality and operations managers in healthcare are the most reschedule-prone buyers we have ever worked with, and the reason has nothing to do with us. Their day is other people's emergencies. A director will accept a meeting sincerely on Monday and be standing in a full lobby or a full ward on Thursday. The meeting did not fail. Thursday did.

Nine months into that account we had booked 156 meetings, held 97, and put the product in front of 138 companies. A hold rate of 62 per cent.

The number moves with the buyer, not the rep

We now have four years of these ratios across forty engagements, and the pattern is consistent enough to plan against.

At the top, a games platform we sold into media groups and telecom operators held 88 per cent of 85 meetings. A weather business selling into agriculture and energy held 87 per cent of 97. Those are not better reps. They are buyers whose diaries are their own, being asked for something small.

At the other end sit the categories where the buyer's day belongs to someone else, or where the purchase is a committee event rather than a decision. Enterprise learning platforms, ERP, anything sold to finance leadership in the middle of a close. Those run in the fifties and sixties no matter who is on the phone.

The useful conclusion is not that some segments are bad. It is that the ratio is an input to staffing, and a team that plans as though every segment holds at 85 per cent will miss its number twice: once on the calendar and once on morale.

What we changed

Three things, and we still do all of them.

We plan pipeline to the segment's ratio rather than to a house average. If a client's buyers are hospital operations managers, the target is written in booked meetings, and the held number is derived from the ratio we have observed, not hoped for.

We reconfirm at the point the buyer's day turns, not the day before. For an operations audience that is the morning of, not twenty-four hours out. When Dubai flooded in 2024 one of our clients asked us to reconfirm every meeting in the diary rather than assume, and we did. That is the correct instinct, and it should not require a storm.

We count the reschedule, not just the no-show. A meeting moved twice and then held is a success with a cost attached. A meeting moved twice and then abandoned tells you something about the account that the booking never did.

The failure this prevents

Left alone, a team with a hold-rate problem drifts. Not deliberately, and rarely visibly. Reps quietly move down the org chart towards people who answer, confirm and turn up: the manager who cannot sign, the analyst who is curious, the consultant who wants to network. The calendar looks healthy. The pipeline is full of people who were never going to buy.

We would rather book fifteen.

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