You have a prospect in your sales cycle, everything seems to be going well, you're excited for your next meeting to dig into things more deeply.
After waiting on the conference line — by yourself — for ten minutes, you call it.
You’ve officially been stood up. A no-show.
No-shows are the most painful type of ghosting that can happen in sales. A no-show isn’t merely a prospect “going dark” on an email thread. It’s worse. They leave you hanging, often alone, in a virtual conference room.
No-shows are (far too) common.
Our friends at Outreach estimate anywhere between a 20% to 35% meeting no-show rate is standard. They identified this as such a big issue they built a feature to make it easy to reschedule no-shows!
Besides the hit your ego takes, no-shows waste time for reps, lose money for an organization, and can create a series of unnecessary exchanges to reschedule the meeting.
We got excited when one of our customers asked if we could track no-shows. When we dug into the data, and analyzed these no show meetings and the prior meeting, we learned some interesting things:
- Similar to the data from Outreach, 10-30% of meetings were no-shows.
- We found some reps consistently had more no-shows compared to their peers. This data excludes meetings canceled at the last minute, so this number may be higher in reality.
- The typical rep waits for 8-11 minutes before exiting the meeting. This time does not include preparation time, time to reschedule and getting “back in the zone.” Wasted time.
- The best predictor of a no-show is the next steps from the previous call. No-shows tend to have fewer, less specific next steps.
Suggestions to Reduce No-Shows #
It’s nearly impossible to eliminate all no-shows. Life happens. However, here are three tips to reduce the average 10-30% no-show rate.
1. With Chorus installed, you can sort no-show and reschedule rates by rep. Specifically, you can look for reps with higher than average no-show rates. You should also look at reps with longer than average sales cycles, or a large number of stalled deals (those with no activity or response from the prospect.)
2. For those reps identified, jointly review the last five minutes of their previous recorded calls and the calendar details for an agenda.
It’s easier to bail on a meeting if the next steps in the sales process were unclear, not jointly agreed to, or if the agenda for the meeting is vague or undefined.
Bonus: Chorus.ai will automatically highlight the actual next steps from within a call, making it easy to identify stalled deals in the pipeline well before they die.
3. Email prospects ahead of the meeting and include the agenda and open items to review.
Some calendar-scheduling software can automatically email meeting participants before the meeting. Chorus.ai also has this feature built-in.
It’s time to start tracking your no-show rates, then taking the appropriate steps to reducing them to as close to zero as possible.
Time is money. Wasted time is wasted money and lost revenue.
Don’t get ghosted by a no-show again.