One of the common questions we get at this time of year is this, “More meetings are rescheduling or canceling what can I do to stop this?”
The first thing to look at is your confirmation and follow up process. Are you doing everything you can to make sure your prospect gets the meeting on their calendar? Are you scheduling reminders? Are you calling at the time of the meeting to see if they got caught up in a task and need a reminder to jump on?
If you said yes to all these things, why is it that your hold rate is still lower right now? Quite simply, it is the time of year. Benefits professionals are not the only ones who are in the race to the end of the year as we head into the fourth quarter – so is everyone else in business!
If you haven’t run a business yourself, do a quick search on year end business checklists and you see that the list is long and it doesn’t typically include “renew your benefits and other insurance”.
Check this example out:
- Get financial records in order
- Prepare financial statements
- Analyze financial statements
- Evaluate results against goals
- Prepare new budget
- Assess employees and consider bonuses
- Prepare any statutory documents
- Update employee and payroll system
- Audit vendor files
- Conduct inventory
- Backup data systems
- Audit website
- Project staffing needs for coming year
And this list goes on and doesn’t include “continue to run your business” or “renew your insurance”. So, do you think it is possible that your prospect had the best of intentions when setting a meeting but simply got overwhelmed by other priorities internally? Of course. How do you best handle it? Acknowledge the busy time of year when you get it reset and stay calm. Like every other business, we have seasons, and this is one that is both full of the excitement of finally closing cases that have been in your pipeline for a long time and the reality that you will deal with more resets and a lower hold rate overall. When you track the numbers year to year, you can take the emotion out of it and let the math of marketing do its job.