How Long Does Outbound Take to Book Meetings?

What happens in the first 90 days?

This is the timeline we work to for Done For You clients. Every market is different, so treat it as a guide, not a promise.

Weeks 1-2: onboarding call, your market mapped, sending set up.
Weeks 2-3: you approve the messages and LinkedIn outreach starts.
Weeks 3-4: email starts, once the domains have had two to three weeks to warm up.
Weeks 4-8: first meetings land.
Month 3 on: meetings flowing, and sharper every month.

Your part is small. Plan on about two hours in month one. After that, your job is to turn up to the meetings and a weekly call with your client success manager (fortnightly at most).

The one thing we do commit to in writing: if your outbound campaigns are not live and sending within 30 days of onboarding, we keep working at no extra cost until they are.

Why can't outbound start sending on day one?

Cold email doesn't send from your main business domain. The email domains take two to three weeks to warm up before anything sends at volume.

Skip that and your emails land in spam. Then nobody sees them, no matter how good the message is. The same thing can happen later if sending starts landing in spam. Fixing it means fresh domains, and fresh domains need the same two to three weeks of warm-up.

LinkedIn doesn't need that wait, which is why it usually goes live first.

What should the first month of sending tell you?

The first month is about signals, not volume. There are three to watch, in this order.

Are people replying at all? Even "no thanks" and out-of-office replies count here. They tell you the emails are reaching the inbox. If almost nobody replies, not even to say no, the emails are probably landing in spam. That gets fixed straight away, before anything else.
Are the right people interested? These are the positive replies. If people are reading but not interested, the gap is usually the offer, the proof, or the next step you're asking them to take. Not the wording.
Are the interested people booking? If people say yes but don't book, look at speed and clarity. Reply within minutes, not days. Give them clear times. Make it obvious why the meeting is worth their time.

Also check who is replying. Positive replies from tyre kickers who would never buy don't count. You want interest from businesses that could actually become clients.

Watch: how to tell which part of your outbound is stuck

Alex Bell walks through the outbound funnel step by step, from emails sent to meetings booked, and what to fix when each step falls short. Watch on YouTube

Why does it take a couple of months to find what works?

Most of the results come down to two things: what you're offering, and who you're sending it to. The exact copy matters far less. So the testing that matters is big tests, not small ones. A different offer or a different reason to reply. Not a new first line or a reworded call to action.

A lot of businesses have grown on referrals. The people who come through already know, like and trust you. A cold buyer doesn't. They need to understand what you do and the outcome you deliver in a few seconds. Founders often write the hardest messages for a cold audience, because they know the product too well. Getting that message simple takes a few rounds.

So we test one main market with one main offer first, and try different ways of saying it. Once something works, we scale it before adding new markets. It's easier to scale what works than to start from scratch on a new segment.

And if a campaign is already getting positive replies, we don't stop it to chase something better. It keeps running while new versions get tested beside it.

Why do some prospects take months to book?

Not everyone you reach is ready to buy right now. Some people will jump on a call this month. Others need months of staying in touch before the timing is right.

That's why outbound works best as an ongoing channel, not a one-off campaign. People who reply but aren't ready yet go into a long-term nurture, so you stay top of mind until they are. We have clients still nurturing people who first replied years ago, who are only now ready for a meeting.

So the meetings you get in month one are only part of the picture. The interest you build early keeps paying off later.

Do outbound deals take longer to close than referrals?

Usually a little. A referral arrives already trusting you. An outbound prospect is meeting you for the first time.

If your referral deals close in about a week, expect outbound deals to take a couple of weeks longer, maybe a few. If your normal sales cycle is already months long, outbound won't be any shorter. Done well, you can get outbound to close as fast as your other deals.

This is where a strong sales process helps. Good pre-call material, so prospects arrive already knowing what you do. And a clear next step booked at the end of every call, so deals don't stall in someone's inbox.

When should you worry, and when is it just early?

It's just early if

You're still inside the warm-up window and email hasn't started yet
People are replying, including "no thanks", but positive replies are still building
Some of the right people are interested, and the messages are still being tested

Worry, and fix it now, if

Email has been sending for a while and almost nobody replies at all
Lots of people reply, but almost none are interested
Interested people aren't booking because replies are slow or the next step is unclear

Each of these points to a different fix. That's why you look at the numbers in order, starting at the top.

What does it look like once it's running?

Past results are examples, not promises. Every market and offer is different. A few from businesses we've worked with:

Werkflo: $2.45M in pipeline in 3 months.
Orbit Marketing: $240K in new recurring revenue a year, added in 5 months.
Keyvision: $350K in new recurring revenue a year, added in 9 months, then went on to a $10M exit.
AspectPT: $700K to $5M in pipeline in 12 months.

"This is the first time we've ever paid an agency to do something for us that I'd say is actually working. The quality of leads is great. We're literally hitting a wall trying to keep up with the capacity to respond." Zack Wasson, Director, DIOSPATIAL

Common questions

When will we get our first meeting?

For a Done For You build, first meetings usually land around weeks 4-8. We don't promise a date or a number, because it depends on your market and your offer.

Why can't you just start sending next week?

New email domains need two to three weeks to warm up before they can send at volume. Skip that and the emails land in spam. LinkedIn can start sooner, so it usually goes first.

Do you guarantee a number of meetings?

No. The only thing we commit to in writing is this: if your outbound campaigns are not live and sending within 30 days of onboarding, we keep working at no extra cost until they are.

How much of my time does the first month take?

About two hours in month one. After that, you turn up to the meetings and a weekly call with your client success manager (fortnightly at most).

What if we start in January?

Start in January and expect to be ramped by March or April. The setup and testing time is the same whenever you start.

Sources

Read the full video transcript

Auto-generated from the video, lightly cleaned. Some words may be mis-heard.

00:00 So in this video, we're going to be going over how to identify and solve bottlenecks in your outbound process. So cold email in LinkedIn specifically. So what we're going to do is just go through basically it step by step and analyzing the funnel. The first point is emails sent. So number of emails sent number two under that will be replies. positive reply. Underneath positive reply, we've got meetings booked. Then we've got meetings showed. next call slashstep booked in and then we've got closed. So if we look at the first one and we go number of emails sent under that we've got replied positive replies meetings booked meetings showed next call or next step and then closed. If we're looking at that and we can basically just clearly identify what is the bottleneck. So I'll run through some very very common ones. So first of all number of emails sent. So we want to make sure that we're sending a good enough volume of outreach per day, right? And obviously this depends on your market size. Typically, you want to be contacting your target market at least once every month. So, depending on the size of your target market. Say, for example, it's 20,000 people in your total addressable market decision makers, then obviously you're going to be sending let's just say a,000 emails a day because it's about 20 21 days in a work month, right? And so, that's

01:13 typically the volume you need to send. If you've got a target market of 100,000 prospects, decision makers, then obviously you can scale up the volume from there and you see how it works, right? So that's point number one. So point number two is going to be total replies. So if this is above one so basically there's two aspects this one is total reply rate including out of office and then the other is just reply rate in general excluding out of office. What we want to be looking at is that we're getting a reply rate of at least 1%. So that being excluding out of office. So reply rate of greater than 1%. That basically lets us know that we're landing in the inbox and you know all is good on that end, right? that's excluding out of office. Out of office, it depends on the season, depends on the time of year. this can go up, you know, as far as it could be be getting a 1% standard reply rate and you could be getting a 3% out of office, 2%, 1.5%, really depends. So that's reply rate. So if we're getting above a 1% reply rate, then you know that's not bad. We're letting in the inbox basically. Positive reply rate. Now, this really depends and a lot of people like to say that they're getting an 80% positive reply rate or a 20% positive really just it it's quite deceptive when it comes to that. what we want to be thinking is how many positive

02:31 replies are we getting per total number of emails sent basically. so for example a good metric that we look at when it comes to this is are we getting basically a good campaign like a really good campaign typically gets one positive reply per 100 emails sent. So that's how we look at it. We don't work out the positive reply rate from the total reply rate. that can be a decent measure in some instances. but just for this purpose we want to be looking at how many positive replies from each email sent basically. So per 100 cent positive reply rate of 1% so greater than 1% is a great campaign when it comes to cloud email outreach you can get it higher we've got it up to 3 4% but 1% is a pretty good you know mark to get to at least right obviously it comes down to a few factors which we'll get into meetings booked on average we convert about one in four one in five positive replies into a meeting so if we're getting at least a 20% % meeting book rate then then that's good. So at least 20% of positive replies are being converted into a meeting showed this really does depend on the industry but typically we see about an 80 90% chart rate. In most cases we get about 90% show rate. You got to be doing at least an 80% show rate. You can definitely get that up to like a 90 95% for sure. So we'll just leave that at 80 as a good show rate. next call and next step

04:00 really is going to be down to your sales process and also what you're offering, what you're selling, and basically how you go about your sales process, right? You may only need one call, you may need multiple calls. It really does depend. But getting this next call and next step booked in. A really good rule of thumb here that we like to see is that at least 50% is what we want to be aiming for. So 50% of meetings showed converting into a next call or step. that is something that we want to be getting to. It can be less initially, it can be more, but 50% is pretty good. So, one in two of the calls that you you shot with progress to the next stage, next step. close. This again really does depend and come down to your sales process and also what sort of timeline that you're looking at. A lot of the clients and offers that we work with have a relatively decent size sales cycle. And so it's very hard to say just on in a in a say a month cycle of what the close rate is for a lot of the offers that we work with. But again, the higher the better here. I'm not going to put a number to it today, but just due to the fact that it does really depend on every industry, but obviously the higher the better. Typically take your inbound blows rate, look at that, and then depends, but typically maybe have that, right? And then you can get what you'd expect. So obviously inbound

05:19 at the moment it might be coming from referrals, word of mouth and things like that. So if you're converting about 50% of the opportunities that you've got from outbound, you might be converting at 25% for example. But it really does depend. I'm going to go through each step now and look at some bottlenecks and how to actually solve that. So I've gone through basically a good percentages and good metrics to be looking at. But if we're not hitting those, what do we look at and why and how do we solve that? So number of emails sent, this is obviously send as many as possible. It's dependent on your target market. let's look at reply rate. So if you're not getting a 1% reply rate, then that's something that we need to fix pretty much immediately. Now, this can come down to the most common culprit is your deliverability. So basically, you're not landing in the prospect's primary inbox. Cuz basically, a 1% reply is one person responding out of 100 people that you're contacting. So if one person isn't at least saying no thanks or not interested or remove me or whatever it is, then you're probably not landing in the primary inbox. And you got to have enough data to back that up. But generally we'll be able to see after about 500 to a,000 emails sent. So if it's not at 1% reply rate, definitely pause your current outreach. Then look at your basically your infrastructure

06:27 setup. So your emails and your domains and look at if you're using a sending tool like Smart Lead or Instantly or any others out there. You want to be looking at that warm-up score as well. Making sure that you're not landing in spam in the warm-ups. Second to that, if you're getting a 100% basically percentage in your warm-up score, you've done some deliverability tests and all is good, you also want to be looking at your spam words that you're using, making sure it's plain text. And that solves the case in 99% of the time. if your warm-up score is low and you have been landing in spam and you know you have, pause all current campaigns and outreach from those email addresses. And basically you want to be setting up depending on how big your target market is and how soon you want results. But I would definitely be setting up some new domains and accounts. And obviously this will take 2 to 3 weeks to warm up. So restart when those warm-up scores are at 100%. And also if you've got those new accounts ready to go. So now that we've got that solved, we need to look at the positive reply rate. So positive reply rate of 1% on emails sent. So one positive response per 100 sent. If we're not hitting a 1% positive response rate, then we obviously don't have something that the prospect really wants or is, you know, really just willing to respond to at the core of it, right? And so,

07:41 basically, we want to be looking at what offer are you using, like what are you actually sending out? So, obviously, back to one of my other videos, which is basically going through the each core principle. So, obviously looking at your offer, looking at your social proof, looking at your lead magnet, so lead magnet and and call to action. So basically looking at those three right there. That will typically get us to a 1% if we fix those core three. So your offer, social proof, and lead magnet. They're the three that are typically going to get you to that 1% positive response rate and above in some cases. Right? So looking at your offer, what are you actually sending out? Your social proof and lead magnet. So prospects need a clear reason to reply and an obvious next step. So check out my other video if you want a bit more in-depth on those three. But you need to be looking at those three. Improve these as a whole. And generally if you crack that you'll get a 1% positive response rate. The other thing as well if you are getting close to a 1% response rate but it's not exactly a 1% fly rate but you you have a massive target market and you're just scaling it out. Just let it rip and you can just test as you go. So I wouldn't be pausing stuff to change and try and perfect it but just let it rip and then you can adjust and improve over time to AB test different emails by

08:51 fixing these. Right? But if you're getting an absolute horrible positive response rate, like you've sent out 5,000 emails and you've gotten one or two positive responses, then you definitely need to look at those three there. provided that you are getting a response rate, total reply rate of over 1%. Meetings booked. So if you're not converting 20% or more of the positive responses into meetings booked, few reasons for this obviously the core one is that prospects don't want to shop and prospects don't want to go to a meeting with you at the core of it. So what is the next step? What's in it for them? Right? So maybe they've received the lead magnet from you. They've received more information about what it is you offer, what you do, but they just haven't seen the need to progress to that next step. Basically, the core of it is you need to really make sure that the prospect can understand what you do, what the cost of inaction is if they don't do what you're doing. Also, the social proof within there. So everything, every piece of content, every resource needs to contain those core elements in there. But the other thing as well is the response to the prospect. So if a prospect replies and you don't respond for a couple days or a few days, then that rate is dramatically going to go down. So you want to be responding as quick as possible,

09:55 typically within sort of 30 minutes is pretty reasonable. Within an hour is reasonable. U obviously any quicker is great. So 5 to 10 minutes, 15 minutes will probably get you some better results and that's generally what we see. The other thing here that you can do if you are getting a low meeting booked rate is also some warm calling. So you can call the leads, you can book them in that way, you can explain more to them and also just see why they didn't book a call initially. And also the other thing is having some clear meeting times in your email back to them when they respond. So if a prospect just is uncertain about what the next step is, you're typically not going to see as many meetings booked as you would like. So typically it can be pretty easy to get this to a 20% meeting booked rate and beyond. So meetings showed. So 80% meeting show rate is the benchmark that we want to be aiming for at least. If we're getting below this, the most common thing, again, reverse engineering. Why does a prospect, why would a prospect want to show up to a meeting with you, right? And just reverse engineer that and actually think through why would they? Cuz in sometimes you may think, yeah, they just want to book a meeting with me. Like, yeah, get them to book a meeting with me, whatever it is, right? And so, they don't really know why they should book a meeting with

10:57 you. So, you really want to understand and just like jot that out why they should book a meeting with you. as simple as it sounds, but like why would a prospect want to meet with you and waste or in their mind they could waste 15, 30, 45 minutes on a call with you? Basically, reverse engineer that. Understand why they should and then use that messaging in your pre-core sequences. So, make sure if you don't already have some sort of pre-core sequence, pre-core reminder system in place to email, potentially text them if you have a pretty bad show rate. Texts aren't necessary. We use them every now and then, but basically just standard email reminders. So 24 hours before an event, 4 hours before an event, and then 1 hour before a meeting. That will generally get you there in most cases. In those pre-core reminders and sequences, we want to be nurturing those prospects with every chance that we get. So it could be your FAQs, it could be a video overview of what you do, could be some case studies, social proof, whatever it is, they're generally what will get us the best results. When it comes to that, the core is that you want to be showing it to meetings with prospects and they actually understand what you do and how you can help them, right? You don't want to be showing it to the meeting and have it an information sharing session where you're

11:59 just wasting half an hour of your life explaining to the prospect what you do, why you're different, answering the same questions all over again, which is absolutely so annoying. So, definitely don't want that. You want to be doing as much of the pre-work as possible. Really, just like do the work once, takes you an hour, takes you 4 hours, but you don't have to spend so much time on every call and it speeds up that sales cycle and it's just so much easier for the prospect as well. They can watch the content in their free time whenever they want. We're getting 80% show rate. Now looking at the next call and next step at about a 50% conversion rate from there. Few things here. One is are we actually reaching out to qualified prospects. So prospects that are in your market are a good fit for what you do. This comes back to really before we send out emails which is the database basically the lead list that we're going to be reaching out to, right? And so you want to make sure that that list is verified with basically you can run AR research with different tools like clay to make sure that their companies that fit your ICP fit your criteria, your size. for example, they might have to have 10 employees or more. You can look at things like that. Analyze the company's description just to make sure that that that company that you're reaching out to is actually going to be

13:01 a good fit so that by the time you get on this call, you know they're going to be a good fit. The other thing here as well is not getting the next step booked in. So, let's just say you had a great call. Obviously, not every call is going to go amazing. Some prospects are just going to get on the call, ask a few questions, you may explain some stuff, and they might just say, "Oh, look, it's not a really good fit right now." Which is fine. It happens. It's sales. But basically, let's just say the call went well. A lot of times where I see a lot of deals drop off and a a lot of deals just don't go through is that the salesperson or founder CEO just hasn't provided a clear next step. So for example when you're on a discovery call let's say right we'll call it simple discovery or intro call at the end of that call what's the next step or a lot of people they're not already aware of this is I'll end it look yeah I'll send you some information you know let me know when works best to catch up next. There's no clear next steps in there, right? And so a lot of things can come up in the prospect's world. They may forget about you, forget to respond to your email. The easiest thing here is just to get the next step booked in. Just ask a prospect, look, when would work next for you to catch up. Typically, this is next steps, right? Or you just explain the next steps and say,

13:59 look, when would you like to catch up next? Couple points to do this. One is if the prospect says, oh, no, look, we'll get back to you with a time. And they're just a bit un certain, then you obviously know that maybe they're not that interested in what you offer for whatever reason. you can go a bit deeper and and sort of say, "Oh, look, you don't really seem that keen to catch up again. Like, any reason for that? Is there anything I missed today or is it not a good fit?" You can go into that and just go into that objection handling, right? You know, main point is just to not waste either of your time. but yeah, basically getting that next call, next step booked in the calendar. Even if it's just a placeholder, this works really, really well, right? So, hey, mind if I just put in a 15-inute slot in a couple weeks and we can catch up then or something like that, right? if they're a bit hesitant to putting something in. If it's still a no, then obviously spend your time elsewhere, right? And that's provided you've answered some questions and objections and that sort of thing. If we look at the close rate, this really does depend on what it is you're offering, how big your typical sales cycle is. If you even from inbound leads, basically your average close time is is 120 days or 240 days, then obviously outbound's not going to take any less than that,

15:00 right? Your typical inbound basically sales cycle is 7 days. Okay, that's great, right? Outbound's probably going to take a couple weeks, maybe a few weeks. If you do a really good job, you can definitely get it to equal the same. Basically, we want to be focusing on these core pillars in order to maximize our results from outbound and make as much money as possible. If you have any other questions, definitely comment below or reach out and happy to help. We do have a couple offerings. number one is out done for you. So, if you want help for us to just manage this for you, there'll be a link below. we can book a call and we can run through what it would look like to work together. Second option is the done with you. So, this option is basically because we couldn't help 95% of our market. And so, basically, if you want us to help guide you through that, we do run a 2-day workshop live where we help implement it for you and with you. And so, that's a two-day workshop. So, obviously, you don't have the ongoing retainer fees or anything like that. So, this definitely works best if you're anywhere from sort of 300k per year up to 1, two, or 3 million per year, potentially even more. depends on where you're at in your business journey. A lot of people, they might just want to run it in-house and not have to rely on anyone external. In other cases, they may just want us to do

16:07 it for them. That's basically it for today and there will be some other videos as well if you want a bit more in depth on each of these points.