PM Robot

In 2022 we were hired for one month. Every meeting we booked took place.

Twenty booked, twenty held. It is the only engagement on our roster with a hundred per cent hold rate, and it is worth explaining why, because the reason is not that our rep was luckier than everybody else's.

Three things lined up. The market was Dubai property in 2022, when every developer in the city was starting projects and short of people to run them. The buyer was the person with the problem rather than a committee. And the campaign lasted four weeks, which is short enough that nothing had time to be rescheduled into oblivion.

What we did

One month in the UAE, in real estate development, construction and project management consultancy. 20 meetings booked, 20 confirmed held, 19 companies introduced.

Nakheel, Majid Al Futtaim Properties, Arada, Azizi Developments, Danube Properties, Ellington, Bloom, Omniyat, Select Group, Emicool and the Roads and Transport Authority. Alongside them the consultancies who run other people's projects: Arcadis, AESG, CM Project Management, Prompt Project Management, Realpoint.

This was also the first of three engagements we ran for the same software group. The call analytics business and the voice AI business became separate campaigns of their own.

Short campaigns hold better, and the reason is unromantic

Hold rate decays with time. A meeting booked for next Tuesday happens. A meeting booked for the Tuesday after Eid, in a segment where the buyer's week is other people's emergencies, is a coin toss.

A one-month campaign is nearly all near-dated meetings. There is no slow middle where a booking sits in a calendar collecting reasons to move. That is most of the difference between a hundred per cent and the sixty-something that long enterprise campaigns produce, and it is worth remembering before congratulating anybody, ourselves included, on a hold rate.

The honest reading of this engagement is that it was a good test, cleanly executed, in a hot market, with a buyer who could say yes alone. When those conditions exist, outbound looks easy. Knowing they are the conditions is what stops you promising the same numbers when they are absent.

What it shows

Book near. A meeting eleven days out is a different product from a meeting three days out, and the difference shows up in the hold rate rather than in the pipeline report. When a campaign is short and the buyer is a single person, say so, and expect more of it.