Why Demo No-Shows Are Killing Your Sales (And How to Fix It)

Demo no-shows are the single most frustrating experience you can have as a sales rep. You start your day eager to sell with a calendar full of booked meetings, only to be let down again and again as prospects fail to show up or straight up ghost you. Adding insult to injury, the short bout of free time you get from a no-show is not enough to do any meaningful, deep work, and your mind is left wandering about getting that old piece of furniture replaced that's nagging you from the corner.

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In my experience as a founding sales rep at startups, I've had days where the demo no-show rate would be as high as 40-50%. Needless to say, this is a gigantic waste of time and resources, with each no-show costing $100s in lost AE time.

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A salesman who's not selling is a sad state to be in, and in this article, we'll walk through why prospects don't show up, as well as give you practical advice on how to deal with the dreaded no-show problem.

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Why Prospects Ghost Demos

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There's a myriad of reasons why prospects ghost demos and many of those are completely out of your control. But before we dive into listing them, it's important to take a step back and look at the buying process from the point of view of the prospect.

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By the time they decide to book a demo, 90% of the buying journey is behind them. They have done their research, asked their peers, and come up with a shortlist of vendors or providers that they want to try for their solution. The demo is the last step, usually booked at the moment of their highest interest.

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That interest, however, is very fickle, and research shows time and time again that the more time passes between that peak moment and the actual demo, the more the no-show rate increases. Reply.io analyzed their own demos for example, and found that the no-show rate increased up to 24.50% if the demo was booked over a week later, compared to the 6.90% no-show rate for demos booked for the same day!

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As time passes, it's quite likely that one of the following happens, resulting in a no-show:

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1. Changing buyer priorities: These can range from the personal to the professional. The business decided to shelf the project or worse, the person booking the demo might have gotten laid off. Personal matters like health issues and family matters might crop up. Either way, the situation is completely outside of your control, and you just have to accept it, trying to gain more information and reschedule. 
2. They simply forgot: It happens more often than you think! Just because they got a meeting invite, doesn't mean that they accepted it, and with our busy lives, if it's not in the calendar, it will simply be forgotten.
3. They went with a competitor: Business these days moves fast, and people buy from the company that answers first an overwhelming majority of the time. If they booked a demo for next week, they might have bought a solution from a competing company in that time frame!
4. Technical hiccups: A surprise Windows update or bad hotel WiFi can easily kill a demo. Frustrating as it is, thankfully no-shows due to technical difficulties are the easiest to salvage, as the prospect will likely be eager to reschedule as well.
5. Bad reviews: As mentioned above, the demo is booked during the evaluation phase, and if they found negative reviews on G2 or heard something bad about you from a peer (or... the press) they might change their mind about doing business with you.

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As you can see, while quite a few things are out of your control, there are practical steps you can take to improve the demo no-show rate from managing the sales process to overhauling the buyer journey.

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Calendar Management to Improve No-Show Rates

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These steps can be considered basic sales operational hygiene that makes sure the prospect doesn't actually forget that they have a demo coming up.

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1. Monitor calendar acceptance: It's one thing that they received a meeting invite, but it's another, whether they accepted it or not. If they didn't, that's a cue for you to take action with a reminder.
2. Day-ahead reminders: Even if they did accept the invite, send a reminder 24 hours before the meeting to refresh their memory. Make it polite and cordial as a friendly reminder that you look forward to the meeting tomorrow to make sure that it stays on the top of their minds.
3. Use a personal channel: Tying into the above, send the reminder on a channel that's more personal, like a WhatsApp message so it's less likely to get lost in the inbox.

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These should result in a marginal improvement in no-show rates. The other thing you can consider is adding qualification calls before the actual demo happens. While it leads to more friction, it also requires a higher investment from the buyer, which means that they'll be less likely to abandon the process. This approach leads to fewer ghosted demos but comes at the cost of an overall decrease in demos held as prospects are filtered out through the strict qualification process.

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But if you really want to tackle the no-show problem, it's time to redesign your sales process from the ground up. A high no-show rate might indicate that the time between booking and holding a demo is simply too long, or in other words, your sales process is out of sync with their buying process.

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The Real Problem: Your Sales Process Is Out of Sync

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Remember what we said above about the buying process? Buyers book demos at their peak engagement, and we know from statistics that same-day demos have the lowest no-show rate, with each day passing raising the chance of the prospect ghosting.

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Simply put, the entire "book a demo" process most companies currently run makes the buyer lose momentum and gives them plenty of opportunity to change their minds or to go with a competitor. Same-day demos are a step in the right direction but might not be scaleable with busy calendars that get filled up with demo bookings by other prospects.

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The current setup makes the sales cycle longer, and buyer interest fades over time and very quickly at that. The solution then is not to try and fix something that's fundamentally at odds with how modern consumers shop but to meet them where they are with real-time sales.

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Using Real-Time Sales to Fix Demo No-Shows

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Real-time sales should be an intuitive and familiar concept because that's how we buy in the real world. Every business has staff that's ready to pounce on an opportunity when a buyer turns up to browse their wares, whether they're B2C or B2B. The trick is to translate that experience into online commerce.

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Luckily, with a tool like Captiwate, we can do just that. Instead of adding friction to the buyer journey with form-fills and demo booking, we can identify interested visitors, alert our sales team, and have a call with them right there on the website while they're still online.

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This approach relies on the following features to work:

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• Advanced visitor identification: We tell you who your visitors are (company level and individual in the US) and whether or not they fit your ICP by matching them with your CRM.
• User behavior-based alerts: Captiwate looks at how visitors are browsing and alerts you if they are looking at high-intent pages like your pricing. Not only does this alert you about hot leads, but since you can see exactly which part of the page they're looking at, it gives you context for starting the conversation!
• Live video calls: Instead of having to book a meeting off-platform, you can call your visitors directly through your website, turning it into a video call. Furthermore, with screen sharing capabilities you can turn that chat into a live demo right then and there.

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In our experience, even just a simple live chat with visitors yields a 10x increase in demos booked, if the time is not right for them to take the call. However, the problem of demo no-shows is almost completely eliminated, as prospects are contacted proactively at the moment of their peak engagement, beating out the competition in terms of lead response times.

Ready to Fix Your Demo No-Show Problem?

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Yes, we realize the irony of asking you to book a demo after writing an entire article about eliminating demo bookings. 

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But we practice what we preach - if you're reading this during business hours, you'll notice a small Captiwate widget in the bottom right corner of your screen. Click it, and you can talk to us right now about transforming your website into a real-time sales channel.

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And if now isn't a good time? Well, we still have a calendar (we're not monsters). But we promise to show you a better way to engage your prospects - one that will make demo no-shows a thing of the past. Book a demo to see how.

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Don't let another high-intent prospect slip away as you're stuck in a no-show meeting. See how real-time sales can transform your website into your most reliable sales channel. 

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