Your connect rate is a vanity number until you split it

This week our SDR teams made 57,376 dials and got 3,342 connections, a 5.8% connect rate. Of those, 961 turned into ICP conversations of 60 seconds or more. That is roughly 29 in every 100 connections.

Hold that last figure against your own team. A connect only tells you someone picked up. The ICP conversation rate tells you whether your list, opener and timing put you in front of the right person long enough to say something useful. If your connect rate looks healthy but few connections last a minute, the problem is list quality or the first ten seconds, not dial volume. Our post Why Your Outbound Connect Rate Hides Your Real Problem goes through it.

What a qualified meeting looks like

From those 961 ICP conversations we booked 51 meetings, an ICP-to-booking rate of 5.3%.

Agencies quoting 10-20% usually 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 is why our raw booking rate looks lower, and why the meetings hold up.

The evidence:

• 80% 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, 87% were qualified by the client (76 held meetings).
• On our longest-running fintech campaign, it is 100%: 12 of 12 held meetings over 60 days.

When you compare vendors, ask each one how they define a booking and how many of the held meetings the client accepted as qualified. A high booking rate with no answer to the second question tells you little.

What your buyers are saying

These are patterns from fintech and insurtech calls and from this week's blog material. They are not verbatim quotes.

• They ask the price early. Often it comes before they have said what problem they are solving. Quoting at that point turns the call into a comparison of numbers. Qualifying first keeps it a conversation about fit. See When Prospects Ask the Price, Qualify Before You Quote.
• The competitor is often a spreadsheet or a manual process. Buyers are frequently comparing you with the workaround their team already runs, not with another vendor. See Win Against Competitors by Attacking the Manual Workaround.
• Finance says no, and arguing makes it harder. When a CFO closes the door, asking what they already do well opens it again. See Don't Argue With a CFO's No. Ask About Their Secret Sauce.

One thing to use today

Pull your last 20 recorded first calls and mark the point where the prospect first asks about price. Then check whether your rep asked a qualifying question before answering.

If most reps quoted straight away, give them one line to use next time: "Happy to cover that. So I give you a number that's relevant, what are you using today?" It takes five minutes to roll out, and you will see the effect in the next week of calls.

Worth reading this week

• Why Your Outbound Connect Rate Hides Your Real Problem
• When Prospects Ask the Price, Qualify Before You Quote
• Good Results Still Get Paused When Costs Run High

If you want to see how this would work for you

We take a limited number of campaigns per cohort, on the 1st and the 15th. If you want to see whether it fits, book 15 minutes at calendly.com/nurturance-sales/discovery-nurturance-inbound.

Cormac