Appointments with people who turn up and can sign

Bookings are a vanity metric. Show rate isn't.

Any competent caller can fill your calendar. The question is how many of those people turn up, and how many of the ones who turn up can actually sign. An SDR paid per appointment will book you twenty meetings a week with a 30% show rate and call it a good month. That's twelve wasted hours of your time and a pipeline full of noise.

So I report show rate as the headline number, and I structure the work around protecting it. In practice that means three things: verifying the decision-maker before booking, booking while the prospect is still on the phone, and confirming twice before the meeting.

Verify before you book

Before an appointment goes in the calendar I establish three things: does this person have authority to make the decision or are they gathering information for somebody else; is there a real problem worth a meeting, in their words not mine; and is there any timeline attached. If all three are absent, a meeting will waste your time even if they say yes to it. Booking anyway is how an SDR hits their number and destroys your close rate.

Book on the call, not after it

"I'll send you some times" loses 15–20 points of show rate compared with putting the meeting in the calendar while they're still on the phone. The prospect who agrees in principle on Tuesday and never replies to the scheduling email was never really committed — they were being polite. Booking live surfaces that immediately, which is useful information even when the answer turns out to be no.

The confirmation sequence

• Immediately: calendar invite with a one-line agenda and the name of who they'll be speaking to.
• 24 hours before: a short message that asks for a reply. Not "looking forward to it" — something that requires an answer, so silence is a signal.
• 1 hour before: a brief reminder with the dial-in or address.
• If they miss it: a same-day call, not an apologetic email. Roughly a third of no-shows rebook if you reach them within two hours, and almost none rebook from an email sent the next day.

The handoff brief

Before every meeting you get a short note: who they are, what they said their problem was in their own words, what they're currently using, any timeline or budget signal, and the exact objection they raised on the call. Two minutes of reading that turns a cold meeting into a warm one, and it's the part most appointment setters skip entirely.