Meetings booked is a number for the ego
The SDR dashboard glows green. Twelve meetings this week, high fives in the standup, the Slack channel celebrates. Three weeks later someone looks into the pipeline and finds, of all that: nothing. Two no-shows, a student researching his bachelor’s thesis, a solo entrepreneur from an industry you never wanted to serve, and an intern who dutifully accepted because declining feels rude.
“Meetings booked” measures how well someone puts appointments into calendars. Nothing more.
The mechanism behind it is banal, and it still sits in almost every comp plan. Incentivize bookings and you get bookings. The SDR isn’t malicious, he’s rational. If the bonus hangs on the booked meeting, the shaky meeting with the wrong contact is worth exactly as much as the clean meeting with the decision maker. So he takes both. Why wouldn’t he? You told him both count.
The metric that actually says something about the SDR has two filters. First: held, not booked. A meeting that takes place, with a human who shows up. Second: ICP fit, checked against hard criteria. Company size, industry, role of the participant, all as fields in the CRM, not as gut feeling after the fact. Only when both are met does the meeting count. And yes, this can be automated: the match against company data runs at booking time, the show status comes back from the calendar tool, and the dashboard only counts qualified held meetings.
Quick aside, because this argument always comes up: “Then we’re punishing the SDR for no-shows he can’t control.” Only half true. The no-show rate is in large part craft. Whoever books the meeting 45 minutes after the cold contact for the Tuesday after next, with no reminder, no agenda, no sentence about the why, produces no-shows. Whoever confirms properly and makes the value of the conversation clear up front keeps the rate small. That craft is exactly what you want to reward.
The rebuild costs one afternoon in the system and one uncomfortable conversation about the comp plan. Afterwards the meeting number in the dashboard drops, probably by a third, and someone gets nervous. Don’t let it rattle you. The number wasn’t higher before, it was just more wrong.
Look at last quarter’s booked meetings and count how many became a real opportunity. If you don’t know the answer, that is the actual diagnosis.
