Eighty-eight meetings and a hold rate we did not publish
Booking at pace and holding badly is a specific failure with specific causes. Here is what went wrong on one of our fastest engagements, and what we would change.
In three months of 2025 we booked 88 meetings with 42 companies for a low-code automation vendor. That is roughly seven a week into operations and IT leadership at Aramco, a national hospital, Qatar Duty Free, Jotun, a Kuwaiti manufacturer and a Dubai hotel group.
Fewer than half of those meetings happened. That number is not on the client's page on this site, because our rule is that we publish a hold rate only when it clears sixty per cent, and this one did not come close.
Here is the post-mortem instead.
What went wrong, in order of size
The opening was too good. The script asked five questions about processes that run on spreadsheets, approvals that travel by email, and automation requests sitting in an IT queue. Almost everybody recognises that description of their own company. Recognition is not intent, and a prospect who agrees to a meeting because the question was accurate is not the same as one who agrees because he has a problem he is funded to fix.
We were selling to the person who feels the pain. Operations managers know exactly where the manual work is. They frequently cannot buy anything, and their diary is the first thing to be overwritten when something breaks in the business they operate.
The pace hid the problem. Seven meetings a week looks like a campaign working. It took longer than it should have to notice that the held number was not moving with the booked one, because everybody was looking at the line that was going up.
Three months is not long enough to correct. By the time the pattern was unmistakable there were four weeks left, which is enough to change the target list or the message, but not enough to prove that the change worked.
What we would do differently
Add a funding question to the opener. Not budget in the formal sense. Something like: has anyone been asked to fix this, or is it just annoying. It costs one question and it disqualifies half the calendar before it fills.
Book the operations manager and the person above him. Not sequentially. In the same week, referencing each other. Multithreading is standard advice for closing; it matters just as much for holding, because a meeting the boss knows about survives a busy week.
Report the divergence weekly, not monthly. Booked and held on the same chart, with the gap called out in the first line of the report. We now do this on every account.
Say the uncomfortable thing in week three. We knew by then. We said it properly in week seven.
Why publish this at all
Because the alternative is a website where every engagement worked, which no buyer over the age of thirty believes.
And because the honest version is more useful to the next client than the flattering one. If you are selling automation into Gulf enterprises and your champion is an operations manager without a mandate, you now know something that cost us a quarter to learn. The meetings were real, the companies were real, and the lesson is that a script which makes people say yes is not the same as a script which finds people who will show up.