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What I Told an MSP Owner With a 40% Show Rate
One of our Fractional SDR Management customers — an MSP owner — came to Ray with a show rate hovering just above 40%. The appointments were coming in, but half of them weren't showing up. Ray walked him through the exact diagnosis: go back and listen to the calls, figure out if the bookings are soft commitments or locked-in appointments, and then implement a 5-step pre-call process that covers everything from value-driven confirmation emails to same-day no-show recovery. The part most people miss? Garbage appointments don't just waste time — they push your real prospects further out on the calendar, and more time between booking and meeting always means a lower show rate.
If you're running SDRs or BDRs and your show rate is below 60%, this episode walks through exactly where to look and what to fix.
What You'll Learn in This Episode:
- Why a low show rate is almost always a booking quality problem before it's a follow-up problem
- How "garbage" appointments silently destroy close rates on your good prospects
- The 5-step pre-call process Ray walks every Fractional SDR Management client through
- Why a value-driven confirmation email outperforms a standard calendar invite
- The no-show recovery window — and why speed matters more than the script
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Welcome to The Ray J. Green Show, your destination for tips on sales, strategy, and self-mastery from an operator, not a guru.
About Ray:
→ Former Managing Director of National Small & Midsize Business at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he doubled revenue per sale in fundraising, led the first increase in SMB membership, co-built a national Mid-Market sales channel, and more.
→ Former CEO operator for several investor groups where he led turnarounds of recently acquired small businesses.
→ Current founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we currently help IT companies scale sales: www.MSPSalesPartners.com
→ Current Sales & Sales Management Expert in Residence at the world’s largest IT business mastermind.
→ Current Managing Partner of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we scale B2B companies we have equity in: www.RayJGreen.com
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Transcript
A low show rate on the appointments that your SDR, your BDR, or whoever is setting for you is a fixable problem, and it almost always comes down to two things: either you're not setting quality appointments to begin with, or you don't have a pre-call process in place. And if you fix those, you can sometimes double your close rate.
So, one of our customers in the Fractional SDR Management program reached out to me—it's an MSP owner—they're getting appointments, but the show rate is abysmal; it's something just over 40% or something like that. And he asked what he could do about it. And here's exactly what I told him.
Start by going back and listening to those calls. How are they being set? Is the SDR confirming it? Are we clarifying next steps? Or is it just a "Yeah, sounds good, let's talk sometime"—like a half-assed appointment? Because if the appointment isn't locked in properly on the front end, that’s the problem. And that’s fixable—you just rescript it, tighten the playbook, and you stop cluttering your calendar with stuff that's never going to show.
And that matters because if you've got three to five garbage appointments that aren't going to show taking up space, and then you set one with somebody who is going to show up, but it's Monday and you don't have any availability because you have all these other appointments on until Friday, then you just killed your close rate too. Because the show rate on the appointment that had a higher likelihood of showing, but was pushed out from Monday to Friday, now has a lower probability of showing just because the more space and the more time that you add from the time that something is booked to the time that it is scheduled always correlates to a lower show rate. So you don't want to clutter your calendar with a bunch of appointments that aren't going to show because you screw up the ones that will show by pushing them further out. That's the first thing you look at: what's actually happening on the call.
The second piece is the pre-call process. And I break this down into five steps basically:
Step 1: Close the booking the right way. On the original call, the SDR needs to confirm the appointment and then clarify exactly what's going to happen next. Something like: "Great, I've got you locked in for this time. You're going to get an email from me here in just a minute; go ahead and accept that. It's also going to include some info about what we just talked about, and we'll follow up the day before just to make sure we're all set." You confirm it, you lock it in, and you clarify what the next steps are. That's the baseline.
Step 2: Send that confirmation email immediately. But don't make it just the administrative stock follow-up that comes on a Calendly or HubSpot calendar. What we want to do is send that calendar invite alongside something that speaks to the pain point that they just discussed and frames the meeting as something that’s actually worth showing up for, rather than just a sales call. So: "Hey, on this call, we're going to walk through X, and you'll leave with a roadmap to do Y." If you can create a deliverable that they walk away from on those appointments, that creates some demand. Basically, you want to make the appointment seem desirable—like it's a source of value and there’s something you’re going to get from it, not just a sales call.
Step 3: 24 hours before, have the person that set that appointment call and confirm. You call in the morning; if you don't reach them, leave a quick voicemail: "Hey, we talked earlier this week, just wanted to confirm the call with so-and-so tomorrow at such-and-such time. You mentioned this pain point, and they're going to walk you through exactly how we've helped other companies solve that, get your case study, or whatever it is." Have them leave a voicemail. If they don't reach them in the morning, try again in the afternoon. But 24 hours out, you want to make sure there's a live person—the person that set the appointment preferably—calling to confirm that.
Step 4: One hour before, send an SMS reminder. Something short and simple: "Hey, quick reminder, your call's in an hour, here’s the link, looking forward to it." Don't abuse mobile numbers—it's annoying when it happens—but it is a good reminder. I see them, and it's helped me remember certain appointments that I probably would have forgotten about. If you don't have a mobile number, you can use an email as a backup, but text is far better.
Step 5: Have a protocol in place for if somebody doesn't show. If someone doesn't show up on the appointment, wait three to four minutes, then call them. If you have their cell, call them on their cell, or shoot a text, send an email, and have some kind of cadence that kicks in right away. Because speed matters. Most of the no-shows that you get, you can actually recover them the same day if you move really quickly—as long as the appointment was legitimate.
So, quick recap: Close and confirm properly, send a value-oriented confirmation email (not just a calendar invite), call to confirm 24 hours before, text one hour before, and have a process ready to go if people don't show up. If you get this in place and then go back and listen to a handful of calls that didn't show, I can almost promise you that there's a way to dramatically improve your close rate—and in their case where it’s hovering in the 40s, you’ll probably double it.
Adios.
