Buyers have changed how they do things, and one of the biggest shifts is in how they respond to outreach.

I’m going to tell you something that nobody else is going to tell you. Making appointments with prospects is harder—much harder—than it was 20 years ago, or even 10. That’s a problem, because if you’re like most business owners, your sales metrics and processes were set up for the old numbers and the old ratios. And now you’re asking the title question, and you’re probably misdiagnosing the problem.

Sales is the one department in the building where people diagnose underperformance as a character flaw. “Our salespeople aren’t working hard enough.” “They aren’t hungry.” “They’ve gotten lazy.” “They aren’t skilled enough.”  Do any of those statements sound familiar? Based on original research I’m conducting right now, when sales results disappoint, approximately 80% of business owners first push harder on accountability and activity. The problem is that what they’re measuring is no longer valid.

That said, those sentiments may contain just enough truth to fool you. It’s true that effort and skill can vary amongst salespeople. People aren’t machines or clones. However, the biggest issue in today’s selling is that our selling environment and buyer habits have changed seismically during the last decade. Your salespeople probably are not the problem. The math is, and almost no one has updated their expectations to match it.

What actually changed?

For many years, the most predictable number in selling was this: Calling using a good database and a strong introduction, you’d get a conversation with your targeted prospect on about one of every three dials. If your introduction were strong, you’d get an appointment on one of every two or three conversations—an appointment every six to nine dials. At the 20 dials per hour I’ve watched salespeople average for years, an hour of focused calling got you two or three appointments. Call this week, get appointments next week—it was a linear relationship, and now it’s gone.

In most business-to-business (B2B) industries today, you’re lucky to get a conversation on one of every 10 dials, and the conversation-to-appointment ratio has slipped as well. Now it’s closer to one appointment for every four conversations, most likely because one-size-fits-all messaging isn’t as effective as it used to be. Do that math: 40 dials for one appointment, six appointments next week mean 240 dials, or 12 hours on the phone.

Houston, we have a problem.

What about switching to email?

No problem, right? Problem.

A Martal Group aggregation of 14.3 billion cold email-sends found that 91% of them generate no reply at all, and the average cold email converts to a booked meeting at roughly one in a hundred. Run our six-appointment week through that, and your salesperson is sending 600 emails—every week. Few territories can support that. And every prospect who marks you as spam or blocks your domain closes that channel permanently, sometimes for everyone at your company.

Here’s why cold email stays popular anyway. It lets a salesperson send a hundred messages and feel like they’re working without ever being present for a “no.” I call it the “Snuggie” of sales—a warm feeling of productivity without really accomplishing anything.

What about LinkedIn and everything else?

LinkedIn can be a viable appointment-setting mechanism, but it’s a slow play requiring a sequence of comments, connection requests, more comments, and finally a direct message. The ratios are lower than the old phone appointment setting. Your people should still do it, because the work they don’t do today is the appointment they don’t get in 30 to 60 days, but it’s less direct and less predictable.

Depending on your sales dynamic, walk-in cold calls are still a potential avenue (again, much less so than in the past), and some anecdotal evidence suggests younger buyers actually respond to a handwritten note in the mail.

Today’s salesperson must conduct an orchestra, where each prospecting method is one instrument—and play all the instruments strategically to get prospects into the sales funnel.

So, what do I do about it?

For you, that may mean large-scale spray-and-pray appointment setting is a relic of the past. This isn’t fun to write, and I’m sure it’s not fun to read, but it also might be our reality going forward. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t tactics we can employ to grow. It just means that we have to work smarter. Here are some ideas:

1. Guard and work your current relationships. Sales organizations often neglect current customers while pushing prospecting, yet they can be your best source of new revenue. Create a matrix of customers and product categories, and work to fill the gaps. If they could use it and they aren’t buying it from you, work to ensure that they are. This might mean kicking a competitor out. Good. Those same competitive impulses that were channeled into large-scale prospecting are your friend here.
2. Prospect smarter. If each appointment takes more to get, make sure that energy is spent on the right prospects. Large-scale prospecting necessarily meant setting appointments with smaller prospects, just to hit the numbers.
3. Rethink your metrics. Give your current activity metrics a smell test. If half or more of your salespeople are hitting the numbers, then your metrics are probably fine. If not, investigate. Drill down to a granular level, and track dials, connects, and appointments. Do that over a long enough period of time, and you’ll gather real data you can use. I’m not telling you to stop managing activity. Activity management is still how you see a problem coming. The ratios changed, not the principle.
4. Create more inbound paths. Search engine optimization (SEO) may get taken over by GEO—generative engine optimization. That’s optimizing you for AI-powered search, and that’s a whole new ball game. I’m doing a lot of work in this area, and it requires a completely new approach and thought process.

Twenty years ago, prospecting was arithmetic. You knew what 60 dials got you, and you could build a week around it. That predictability is gone, and no amount of leaning on your salespeople will bring it back. What replaces it is judgment about which prospects are worth the effort, which of your current customers are underbought and which channels your buyers actually answer. That’s harder to manage than a dial count, but it’s worth more, because most of your competitors are still running the old playbook and blaming their people for the results.

If buyers have changed their habits, we must adapt our mechanisms for gaining new prospects and customers, while guarding our current relationships more strongly. The companies that come out ahead won’t be the ones that worked hardest at the old approach. They’ll be the ones who saw it change and moved first. That’s not bad news. It’s just news.