If you are having difficulty converting your leads into viable meetings and consultations, you may need to brush up on the most efficient ways to get leads to pencil you into their schedules.

Outreach Tips

Your first outreach is a combination of emailing and calling individuals whom you have some sort of connection with. Perhaps you are part of a similar group or organization, and you’re emailing/calling to propose a meeting about how your services could benefit them. Here are some fast tips to succeed at the initial outreach.

  • Clear Subject Lines
  • State Your Purpose
  • Date of Meeting
  • Persistence is Key

Always be clear about why you’re calling/emailing and be upfront about scheduling a meeting. Including the date of a potential meeting can actually increase the open rate by 30%-40%. Which brings me to my next point, when it comes to emails, you must be focused on open rates. Things that don’t work are offering discounts or sales, as well as vague language about innovation and modernity. Be upfront about what you’re offering and that you would like to schedule a meeting.


Conversation Rate = Total Number of Meetings ÷ Number of Leads × 100


Lead Management

Part of managing leads is making sure that your marketing strategies work. Are they opening emails or filling out contact form submissions? Make sure that your marketing strategies have been tested and proven to increase open and click-through rates. You also want to keep track of the status of your leads. In order to turn leads from cold to warm, categorize them in the following way.

  • Affiliation: Coldest type of lead. You have a loose connection but have never met before.
  • Familiarity: Consider this a cool lead. You’ve met them once or share mutual connections.                                                         
  • Information: Getting warmer. This kind of lead knows about you and your business.
  • Experience: Warm lead. You’ve had conversations, discussed business and/or they attended a presentation.

Use this as a guide to help you increase your chances of setting meetings. You also want to think about qualifying your leads, which requires that you make sure a lead fits your buyer profile, has an interest in your company and is the appropriate person to be pitching services to.

Measure Lead Conversion Rates

This is one of the most important steps to learning how you can turn leads into consultations or meetings. You can measure a conversion rate in a variety of ways; it all depends on how you determine a conversion. For instance, lots of businesses consider a conversion a purchase or sale. For the purpose of this article, we’ll define it an initial meeting. If you want to calculate your lead conversion rate in this instance, use the following formula.

Conversation Rate

Conversation Rate = Total Number of Meetings ÷ Number of Leads × 100. If you scheduled thirty meetings out of a hundred leads, your conversion rate equals 30%. Only when you know your conversation rate can you begin to understand what works to convert leads and how you can improve this number.

If you are interested in increasing the number of meetings you get from your leads, please give us a call and we’ll work on a strategy to help you achieve this.


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