Why Volume Outbound Books Gift Card Meetings

Someone told me about an agency that blasted a hundred thousand names for them.

It booked 50 meetings.

About five of those people were real buyers. The rest showed up and asked where their gift card was.

What actually got measured

The agency was paid on meetings. So it produced meetings.

Nobody lied. The meetings were real. People sat on the call.

But a meeting is not a hard thing to create. Offer a $50 gift card for 30 minutes and you can fill a calendar with strangers this week.

What you cannot buy that way is someone who has the problem, owns the budget, and is thinking about it now.

So the number went up and the pipeline did not move.

The bit that costs more than the money

That team spent weeks in those calls.

Forty five meetings with people who were never buying. Every one of them had to be prepped, taken, and written up.

Then the whole company got a little more sure that outbound does not work.

That is the expensive part. Not the fee. The belief that forms afterward.

Once a sales team decides a channel is dead, getting them to try it again is much harder than it was the first time.

Why this keeps happening

Meetings are easy to count, so they end up in the contract.

The moment a number is in a contract, someone will hit it the cheapest way available. That is not cynicism, that is just what happens to any target.

If the cheapest way to a meeting is an incentive and a hundred thousand emails, that is the road the work takes. Not because anyone is dishonest. Because that is what you asked for and that is what you priced.

The fix is not to find a more honest vendor. The fix is to stop paying for the thing that is easy to fake.

A meeting count is only worth what the definition is worth

I do guarantee meetings. Twenty in sixty days, or I keep working for free until you have them.

That probably sounds like the thing I just spent five paragraphs criticising. The difference is the whole point of this post.

The agency that booked fifty meetings hit its number. Nobody lied. The definition of "meeting" was just wide enough to drive a gift card through it. Any calendar event counted. So the cheapest path to fifty was an incentive and a hundred thousand emails, and that is exactly the path the work took.

A number only protects you if the definition underneath it is tight. Ask what counts before you agree to a count.

The one I work to: the person is in your target market, they can spend money, and they showed up because of what you sell rather than because of what you offered them for showing up. If they cancel and reschedule, that is one meeting. If they turn up for the incentive, it is zero.

That is a harder number to hit than fifty of the other kind. It is also the only kind worth counting.

I still ask one thing before taking the work. Do you already close deals when you get in front of the right person? If you do, this is a speed problem and I can help. If you do not, more meetings will not fix it. They will just make the problem louder.

If you are buying outbound right now

Three questions worth asking before you sign anything.

• What counts as a meeting? Get it in writing. Ask whether an incentive is used to get one.
• What happens to the list after the campaign? A list burned in a month is a cost you pay later.
• Can I see the pipeline number, not the meeting number? If the answer is that it is too early, that is fine. It just means nobody knows yet whether this works.

Fifty meetings sounds like a good quarter.

Five real conversations is a better one, and you will know which you had by the second call.