Last week two people agreed to a call with me. Both were keen. One had told me he could already see what I was proposing. Neither of them showed up.
My first instinct was the obvious one: they had gone cold. People are polite, they say yes to get out of a conversation, and then they quietly disappear. That happens, and it is easy to assume it is what happened here.
It was not. When I looked at what I had actually done, the problem was mine, and it was mechanical rather than anything to do with how interested they were.
What I did wrong
In both cases we agreed the time inside an email thread. Something like "does Friday at 7pm work" and then "yes, that's good". Then I pasted a meeting link into the email and left it at that.
Here is the thing I had not thought about. A link pasted into an email does absolutely nothing on the other person's side. It does not create an entry in their calendar. It does not block out the time. It does not remind them an hour before. It sits in an inbox, gets pushed down by everything that arrives afterwards, and by Friday evening it may as well not exist.
Both of the people I was waiting for are coaches. They spend their day on a pitch, not at a desk. By the time our call came round, the only record of it was an email they had read once, days earlier, on a phone, between sessions.
They had not decided against it, they had forgotten
That distinction matters, because the two things call for completely different responses. If someone has changed their mind, chasing them is annoying. If someone has forgotten, chasing them is a favour.
I had been treating a forgetting problem as a wanting problem, which meant I was about to write off two people who were probably still interested.
The fix is a booking link, and it is not really about convenience
The answer is to stop agreeing times in the thread and send a link instead, so the other person picks a slot and books it themselves.
The obvious benefit is that they choose a time that genuinely works, rather than being polite about one you suggested. But that is not the important part. The important part is what happens the moment they click confirm:
- A real event appears in their calendar, not just in their inbox
- The time is blocked, so nothing else gets booked over it
- Their phone reminds them, without you having to
- You get told immediately, rather than finding out by their absence
None of that happens when you paste a link into a message. All of it happens automatically when they book.
The uncomfortable part
I already had a booking system. It is on my own site, it works, and I built it. I simply was not using it for people who replied to an email, because agreeing a time in the thread felt friendlier and more personal.
That instinct was wrong. The friendly version was the one where two people ended up feeling awkward about a call they had missed.
If you do not have a booking tool
Send a calendar invite they have to accept. Most email clients do this. It is not as smooth as a booking link, but it achieves the thing that matters: the appointment ends up in their diary rather than only in yours.
What does not work is the thing most small businesses do, which is agree a time in conversation and trust that both people will remember. One of you is thinking about that call all week. The other one has a job.
What this really says about follow-up
The wider lesson has stuck with me more than the fix itself. When someone goes quiet, the reflex is to read it as a verdict on you. Usually it is not a verdict on anything. They are busy, the thing fell down their list, and nothing in their day brought it back up.
Before you decide someone is not interested, it is worth asking whether you actually gave them a reason to remember.
If you want to see how I handle the booking side of a site, it is on the Process page, and what a build costs is on the Pricing page. If you are still deciding whether you need a site of your own at all, this one is probably more useful.
A missed call is one way to lose someone. Here are six smaller ones that cost enquiries before anyone even gets in touch.