MCP

Positive reply to meeting

TL;DR

  • Speed is the whole game. The canonical study found the odds of making contact fell by roughly a hundredfold between a five-minute and a thirty-minute response, while the average firm took 42 hours (Harvard Business Review, 2011) [1].
  • Reply short, propose something concrete, and make saying yes a single click or a single word.
  • Do not re-sell. They already said yes to the next step; selling again reopens a closed question.

Why minutes matter

The finding comes from a study of inbound lead response, and it is old enough that the specific numbers deserve the usual caution about age. What has not changed is the mechanism: attention is an expiring asset. Someone who replied at 9:14 was thinking about your problem at 9:14. By the afternoon they are thinking about something else, and your reply arrives as an interruption rather than a continuation.

The same study's other number is the more useful one in practice — the average response time was 42 hours [1]. Most competitors are slow. Being fast is available to anyone and costs nothing.

For an agent working an inbox, this argues for one operational rule above all others: interested replies are handled before anything else in the queue, ahead of writing new campaigns, cleaning lists or drafting follow-ups. A campaign that generates replies nobody answers quickly is worse than no campaign, because it burns list you cannot re-approach.

The shape of the reply

Short. Two or three sentences. The email that won them is not the email that books them; this one just needs to remove friction.

Concrete. Propose a specific time, or a booking link with two or three options visible. "When works for you?" pushes the scheduling work onto the person you are asking for a favor.

Answer what they asked, briefly. If they asked about price, give a range rather than deferring it to the call. Deflecting a direct question to get someone on a call is the move that teaches people to distrust cold outreach.

One next step. A link, a time, or a question — not all three.

Same thread, same voice. Continuity matters: a reply that suddenly reads like a different person, or arrives from a different address, spends the credibility the first email built.

The common ways this goes wrong

Re-pitching. The reply that restates the value proposition converts a yes back into a decision. They have moved on to logistics; meet them there.

Over-qualifying. Three screening questions before a meeting is a good way to lose a meeting. Qualify on the call unless the cost of an unqualified call is genuinely high.

Attaching everything. A deck, a case study and a pricing sheet in the confirmation reply is the cold email's bad habit reasserting itself.

Vagueness about who you are. If a colleague will take the call, say so now.

After the meeting is booked

Confirm in one line, send the invitation immediately, and stop the sequence for that prospect — an automated bump arriving after a meeting is booked is the clearest possible signal that nobody is paying attention. Suppression rules are in Stopping rules and suppression.

References

  1. James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran & David Elkington — The Short Life of Online Sales Leads (Harvard Business Review, Mar 2011; metered)