Book near
A meeting eleven days out is a different product from a meeting three days out. The one engagement where every booked meeting happened, and why it proves less than it looks.
One engagement in our record has a hold rate of 100 per cent. Twenty meetings booked, twenty held, one month, one rep, one market: property developers and project management consultancies in Dubai.
It is tempting to write that up as a triumph of technique. It was not. It was mostly arithmetic, and the arithmetic is more useful than the boast.
Hold rate decays with time
A meeting booked for next Tuesday happens. A meeting booked for the Tuesday after next has a week in which to acquire reasons to move: a board paper, a site problem, a traveller, a colleague who resigns.
A one-month campaign is nearly all near-dated meetings. There is no slow middle in which a booking sits in a calendar collecting excuses. That is most of the difference between a hundred per cent and the sixty-something that long enterprise campaigns produce.
The other two factors in that particular month were the market and the buyer. Dubai property in 2022 was starting more projects than it had people to run, and the person we were meeting could say yes without convening anybody. Hot market, single decision maker, short campaign. Of course it held.
What this is worth knowing
The practical version is a rule about how far ahead to book, and it is one of the few things we enforce.
Aim for three to seven days out. Close enough that the prospect's week is still recognisable to him, far enough that he is not being asked to rearrange today.
Refuse the polite fortnight. When a prospect offers a date two or three weeks out, that is usually a soft no wearing a diary entry. Take it, but treat it as a lead rather than a meeting, and expect to rebook it once.
Never leave a call without something on the calendar. If they do not have their diary, put a placeholder in and confirm later. A meeting that exists in a calendar survives a change of mind better than one that exists in an intention.
Watch the gap between booking and holding, per segment. It is a better predictor of a bad month than any activity metric, and it moves first.
And the honest caveat
We do not quote the hundred per cent to prospective clients as evidence of anything, because using it that way would be dishonest in a specific way: it would imply the number is available on request.
It is available when the campaign is short, the market is hot and the buyer can sign alone. When a client is selling enterprise software into a committee at a national telecom operator, the same team with the same skills will hold sixty per cent, and any agency promising otherwise is either inexperienced or lying.
Knowing which conditions produce which number is the actual expertise. The number is just the receipt.