One number to hold against your own team

Our connect rate this week was 6.3%. That is 2,707 connections on 42,898 dials, or roughly one live person for every 16 dials.

If your dialer reports 15% or 20%, check what it counts. Voicemails, gatekeepers and auto-attendants often get logged as connections. A rate only helps you plan headcount and pacing if it measures a live conversation with the person you wanted.

Of those connections, 674 became ICP conversations of 60 seconds or more. That is the number to track alongside connect rate, because it shows whether your list and opener are reaching the right buyers.

What a qualified meeting looks like

Our ICP-to-booking rate this week was 4.3% (29 meetings from 674 ICP conversations). Some agencies quote 10 to 20%. The gap comes from what gets counted.

Many agencies count anything put on a calendar, including tentative slots weeks out. We only book meetings inside 7 days, never tentative, and only when the prospect qualifies on the call. That makes our raw booking rate look lower. It is also why the meetings hold up.

The evidence:

• 74% of last week's bookings were set within 7 days of the call, with a median of 5 days out.
• Of the meetings booked in the last 30 days that have been held, 86% were qualified by the client (76 held meetings).
• On our longest-running fintech campaign, 92% were qualified (11 of 12 held meetings over 60 days).

The totals are evidence, not the point. A lower rate of meetings your team wants to take is worth more than a higher rate of calendar filler.

What your buyers are saying

Two things came up in recent conversations with prospects.

"Why shouldn't we just build outbound in-house?" One prospect asked this directly, so we did the maths together. One SDR costs about $100K a year, and that is before the SDR manager, the tooling and the ramp time. The comparison that matters is the full cost of the seat against the cost of a qualified meeting.

Where bookings come from. We showed another prospect a report mapping every touch point behind the booked meetings on one campaign. It showed that booked meetings rarely trace back to a single touch. If you only credit the last call, you will undercount the work that got the buyer to pick up.

One thing to use today

Pull your booked meetings from the last 30 days and sort them into three groups:

1. Booked inside 7 days.
2. Booked further out.
3. Tentative, meaning the buyer agreed to "something" but did not confirm a slot.

Then check how many of the held meetings your team actually considered qualified. If a large share sits in the second and third groups, your booking rate is inflated and your pipeline forecast is softer than it looks.

From the blog this week

• How to Audit Your Meeting Booking Rate Before You Trust It
• Your Dialer's Connect Rate Is Lying to You: How to Read It
• The Weekly Booked-Meeting Benchmark: 10 Good, 30 Great

If you want to compare notes

We take a limited number of campaigns per cohort, on the 1st and the 15th. If you would like to see how this would look for your team, book 15 minutes at calendly.com/nurturance-sales/discovery-nurturance-inbound.

Cormac