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That's it.
Your confirmed meetings aren't showing up
It's mid-July and the same message keeps landing in our Slack in both EMEA and USA.
Meetings booked are down. No-shows are up. Even confirmed invites with reminders are ghosting. One leader put it bluntly this week: "Low amount of meetings booked, no-shows even when invites are confirmed, and just tough conversations."
Another described a leaky bucket between discovery and decision calls. Prospects agree, then evaporate.
Sound familiar? You're not alone. And no, it's not just you.
The calendar is real. But it's not the whole story
Yes, July is soft. Prospects are on PTO. Budgets are mid-cycle. Deals drift.
But here's the uncomfortable bit. The summer slump exposes weak process that a strong Q1 hides. If your meetings only hold when buyers are highly motivated, you don't have a seasonal problem. You have a qualification problem that seasonality just revealed.
The leaders in our community who are holding their numbers this month aren't working harder. They're plugging three specific leaks.
Leak 1: The booking was soft to begin with
Deeper discovery upfront. If there's no real pain identified on the first call, the meeting was always going to leak. One leader's fix: quality over quantity on what SDRs are allowed to book in the summer months. Fewer meetings, higher hold rate, same pipeline.
Ask your reps this: can they tell you, in one sentence, why each prospect agreed to the meeting? If not, that meeting is at risk.
Leak 2: Dead air between booked and held
The gap between the booking and the meeting is where deals go to die. Day-of reminders are table stakes, not a strategy.
The fix from the community: send something relevant in between. A one-pager tied to the pain they mentioned. A customer story from their industry. Anything that re-enforces why they said yes in the first place.
Leak 3: The confirmation email that kills the meeting
The most common mistake: "Does this time still work?"
You just gave them permission to say no.
The better version reiterates what they told you. Something like: "Last time we spoke, you mentioned X, Y and Z. Has anything else come up you'd like to cover?" It reminds them of their own reasons for taking the call. Their reasons, not yours.
Small change. Big difference in hold rates.
Now let's put a number on it
Here's what nobody's published: a real no-show benchmark for the summer months. Connect-to-meeting rates get discussed, but hold rates in July? That data doesn't exist.
So let's build it. Two taps and you're in.
What's your no-show rate looking like this month?
How does this July compare to your normal month?
Results published in a future issue. Vote and you'll see where you stack up against 4,200+ SDR leaders.
Got a number more precise than a bucket? Hit reply and I'll include it in the full breakdown.
See you next week.
Dave
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