We had a problem. 40% of our demos no-showed for my sales team at a past company I worked for. I have seen high no-show rates common across sales departments and customer success departments in many SaaS. We were doing all the conventional things. Sending automated reminders from our booking tool, confirming meeting time on thank you page, we even tried text reminders. Didn't budge. Then in June, we designed a test. For half our demos we kept the exact same process. For the other half, we tried to create a connection immediately after booking (as fast as possible given timezone restrictions). It could mean calling the prospect and letting them know you're excited to chat on Friday and forecasting the agenda. It could be sending them a personal video from their rep they are meeting with (we used Bonjoro). It could be adding them on social with a quick use case sent over relevant to the upcoming meeting. The key metric though was simple. Connect as fast as possible in a 1:1 way (the medium was their choice). Do the reminder as soon as possible to the BOOKING and not to the MEETING. It was such a game-changer. The graph tells all. By creating connection while they were still in the headspace of making the appointment, we were able to create a much stronger hook and attendance increased 15%+!