Attempt rate

Attempt rate is the share of event leads that received at least one recorded sales follow-up attempt within the agreed window, the base measure of whether sales reps worked the leads a show produced.

Attempt rate sets a low bar on purpose. It asks one question before lead quality or outcome: did anyone try? One director of events who runs about 200 events a year keeps a strict scorecard. It treats anything below 90 percent as unacceptable. Most teams can’t report the number at all.

Why does it matter?

Follow-up is where in-person GTM fails most often, because it runs on a policy your reps can skip. Leads sit in a spreadsheet while they go cold. If you run events in marketing, you own the event’s return and can’t make sales do the work that produces it.

At most companies, follow-up runs on rep policy or a weekly manager call. If your team works that way, you get no alert when a lead is missing notes or follow-up. Attempt rate shows you whether your reps follow the policy.

How do you measure it?

Agree on 3 definitions in advance. The leads: every lead the event produced, from capture or import, with an account and an owner. The attempt: a first touch (call, email, sequence enrollment) that lands on the lead’s own record. The window: the SLA your team agreed to, with the clock starting at capture.

Track time from capture to first activity too. If your sales rules let any rep claim an untouched lead after a fixed period, that claim permanently replaces the event’s attribution. Set an alert on your unworked leads before that window opens.

How do you recognize it in practice?

You have attempt rate when you can list the unworked leads from last month’s show by owner in under a minute. If that takes a CRM export and a pivot table, you don’t have the metric yet, whatever your policy says. FieldXM’s reporting shows you attempt rate by event, rep, and team.