Appointment Management in Crisis: Dealing with your Funnel’s Black Hole
This is Part 2 of our blog series around our most recent webinar "Plugging the Leaks in Your Lead Funnel." Click here for Part 1.In early 2024, Gabe Cordova started monitoring appointment outcomes in his database. 97.8% of appointments had no recorded outcome.
This wasn't some struggling startup team. This was the #3 or #4 ranked team in the country.
Lead generation was strong, speed to lead was tight, appointments were getting set constantly. Nobody knew what happened after scheduling.
"We were not managing or monitoring the outcomes. We're setting appointments left and right. We're killer," Gabe admitted. "Guys, you need... I would obsess with a couple metrics here. Appointments are great. The ones that are held and the agents are running with, that's great. But how many times you set appointments and it's not met or you don't know what happened?"
By the time of the webinar, through focused attention on this metric, they'd improved to having outcomes on most appointments. The impact on their bottom line was substantial.
Which raises the question of why appointments matter so much.
Why appointments are your most valuable asset
Think about how the lead funnel works.
At the top, you've got new registrations who've never spoken to you.
Middle of the funnel is leads getting nurtured with campaigns.
Bottom of funnel? People who agreed to meet with you.
"We could have great speed to lead and be hammering the phones and making all the calls, but a lot of times if we don't ask for the appointment, it doesn't just surface," Gabe explained.
Getting the appointment is only half of it. Maybe not even half.
After tracking outcomes for a few months, Gabe's team started seeing patterns in where appointments were falling apart.
The 3 appointment problems
Problem #1: Appointments without outcomes
Most common issue is just not recording what happened. In Follow-Up Boss, appointments can have outcomes like Held, Not Held, Rescheduled, No Show, Cancelled.
Without outcomes, you can't track which agents are meeting with leads. Can't identify which lead sources produce appointments that go anywhere.
True appointment-to-contract conversion rates become impossible to calculate. Coaching agents on showing-to-contract ratios turns into guesswork.
"Folks, we need to obsess as much if not more than new leads with our appointments that were not held and don't have outcomes," Gabe emphasized.
At least with appointments that have no outcome, there's a chance they happened and the agent forgot to log it. The second problem is worse because you know the appointment didn't happen.
Problem #2: Not held appointments sitting idle
Appointments marked "Not Held" that never get rescheduled. Gabe walked through a real example.
Lead sent a message saying they couldn't make it, something popped up. Agent responded asking to reschedule, wanted to know what day and time works.
Over 24 hours later? Still no response, no follow-up call from the agent.
"These are real people, real contact information that agreed to meet with us," Gabe stressed. "And if we started inspecting the appointments not held and don't have outcomes, I promise you team leads right now, obsessing over this one metric will change your bottom line by more than you can imagine."
These leads already said yes once. They're not cold anymore, but they're getting treated like they are.
Even when agents do get someone to show up for that first appointment, there's still a third way things fall apart.
Problem #3: No follow-up appointment set
Agents complete showings but don't get the next appointment on the calendar. ISAs work hard to set that first appointment.
Then after the showing, agents say something like "Great meeting you! Let me set you up on listing alerts. Let me know if you see anything or want to go back out and look again."
"Breaks my heart. Breaks my heart," Gabe said. "Almost every time we're not asking for the appointment, we're putting it back on them to do it."
Even agents who successfully converted from ISA-set appointments struggle here. They were comfortable letting the ISA set the first meeting.
Now they need to ask for the next one, and that's a different muscle.
Before you can fix any of these problems, you need to set up your CRM to track what you're looking for.
Customizing appointment types and outcomes
Your appointment types and outcomes need to match how your business runs, not just use whatever defaults came with your CRM.
Common appointment types teams use:
Buyer Consultation
Seller Consultation
Buyer Showing
Listing Presentation
Follow-Up Showing
Listing Appointment
Sign Documents
Open House Follow-Up
Suggested outcomes:
Held - Ready to Move Forward
Held - Need to Follow Up
Held - Not Ready Yet
Not Held - Rescheduled
Not Held - No Show
Not Held - Cancelled
No Show - Unable to Reach
"If you don't have an idea where to start, guys, this is on the workbook. Just a starting point," Gabe offered. "Rip these off, change them, throw them away. I don't care. Here's a starting point though to make sure you've got appointment types and outcomes and your team understands what they're for."
What matters is making sure your team knows all the options exist, understands what each means, knows when to use which outcome. Getting it into their workflow is where most teams fall apart.
Once you've got tracking set up, you need something that makes monitoring easier day to day.
Using MaverickRE for appointment monitoring
Follow-Up Boss has appointment reporting.
Gabe showed how MaverickRE provides additional visibility that makes the inspection process faster.
"I want a quick easy way to find out what are my appointments. I can say, 'Hey, which ones are set by my ISAs and I want to monitor those appointments.'"
The MaverickRE dashboard shows total appointments, held versus not held, appointments with no outcome, by agent, by lead source. Month-to-date numbers include total appointments set and prominently display appointments with no outcome.
Easily filterable appointments not held too.
"I'm going to obsess over these numbers right now. Why do I not have an outcome? Most of the time it's been a reschedule. Or which are the ones that were not held? These are the ones that canceled or asked to reschedule."
Having that visibility is one thing. Using it consistently is another.
The inspection process
Gabe recommends doing this weekly, though some teams do it daily.
Filter for no outcomes first.
Review each appointment. If it happened, nudge the agent to add the outcome.
If it hasn't happened yet, check if it's properly scheduled.
Then filter for not held. Look at the lead record, check when cancellation happened, verify follow-up was attempted.
No follow-up within 24 hours? Nudge the agent.
After that, filter for held appointments. Check if the next appointment is scheduled.
If not, flag it for coaching.
"I can quickly come over here, where are my no outcomes, who are they, or where are the ones that weren't held," Gabe demonstrated. "What I see over and over...I'm going to see notes where they say, 'Hey, I couldn't make it. Something popped up. We need to reschedule.'"
The problem shows up in the pattern. Agents ask for availability but don't follow up persistently enough to lock in the new time.
They ask once, maybe twice, then move on. Manual inspection helps catch these.
Tedious work though.
Automating the reschedule process
FUB’s Will Gray demonstrated a Follow-Up Boss automation triggered by the "No Show" appointment outcome.
The flow: trigger is appointment outcome equals no show, tag gets added for tracking trends, stage changes from "Booked" to "Hot Prospect," immediate email goes out with a Calendly link to reschedule, next day the agent gets a task reminder to call if there's no response.
"If the agent forgets to restage out of that, that can be a leak," Will explained. "So we want to make sure we're automatically pulling it into hot prospect because they did agree to meet."
This works because the timing matters. Email goes out right away while the lead is still engaged.
The agent doesn't need to remember. If they forget to follow up, the automation handles it.
Creates accountability with the task reminder.
The automation handles the no-show problem, but there's still the issue of getting agents to record outcomes. Gabe's team tried a few things before finding something that worked.
The text message nudge feature
One feature Gabe highlighted from MaverickRE is automatic agent nudging via text.
"We turned on... after every appointment it will text the agent, 'Hey, how'd your appointment with Will Gray go? Was it one met, two not met, three rescheduled?' It'll update it in Follow-Up Boss for you because we weren't getting it."
Creates immediate accountability right after the appointment. Easy compliance, just reply with a number.
Automatic CRM updates, no need to log in. Data accuracy improves because you're capturing it in real-time.
Once you've got all this visibility into appointments and outcomes, it forces you to confront something most teams would rather not think about.
The question to ask yourself
Do you put as much love and attention and accountability on inspecting your appointments and rescheduling for those that canceled, no showed, or needed to reschedule as you do into prospecting brand new registrations that you've never spoken to, who have not given you the time of day?
Most teams? No.
They obsess over speed to lead on new registrations. Meanwhile confirmed appointments slip away.
"Most teams, they are not," Gabe confirmed. "These are real people, real contact information that agreed to meet with us."
The math doesn't make sense. Someone who already agreed to meet is way more valuable than someone who just filled out a form and might not answer when you call.
Teams treat them the opposite way. This misplaced focus hits hard when you're running an ISA team.
ISA teams: This applies to you too
If you have an ISA team setting appointments for agents, this becomes critical.
"I know we have a lot of ISAs on here. We're setting appointments, but let's think about that. We set an appointment for an agent. Sometimes they reschedule, sometimes they no show. And do they always buy on that first visit? They don't."
The hard work of getting someone to agree to meet can't be wasted by poor appointment management. ISAs need visibility into which agents show up to appointments, convert appointments, which need coaching on asking for the next appointment.
Without outcomes being recorded, ISAs work blind.
All of this appointment tracking leads to metrics that tell you what's happening in your business.
The metrics that matter
By the end of focusing on this area, you should know your appointment set rate, appointment held rate, no show rate, reschedule success rate, next appointment set rate, and appointment to contract rate.
"I promise you team leads right now, obsessing over this one metric and knowing what's going on will change your bottom line by more than you can even imagine," Gabe emphasized.
Key takeaways from Part 2:
Appointments are bottom-of-funnel gold, deserve more attention than cold leads
Outcomes must be recorded, can't manage what you don't measure
Not Held doesn't mean lost forever, only if you follow up within 24 hours
Automate the reschedule process instead of relying on agent memory
Ask for the next appointment before the current one ends
Inspect daily or weekly, can't be once-a-month
Use technology to make it easy: text nudges, automatic emails, CRM updates
What's next?
Part 3 explores nurture follow-up, integration partner tags, creating smart lists that surface opportunities. Gabe will share his list of integration partner tags most teams don't know exist and the exact smart lists his team uses to work the funnel from bottom to top.
"We're going to talk about cadences because you do have to slow down. You need to follow up with some people more often, and you have to follow up with some less often," Gabe teased.
👉 Stop Chasing. Start Converting.