What is a good sales call show rate? Benchmarks by industry

A good sales call show rate is 76% or better for inbound calls booked within a few days; about 60% is normal for calls booked two weeks out. The anchors are the only sales figures with a stated sample we could find: a vendor benchmark of 6,428 B2B meetings booked through a lead-routing and scheduling tool (76.1% completed) and a practitioner’s reported analysis of 6,414 meetings by lead time.

Sales call show rate benchmarks at a glance

• Inbound B2B demo meetings: 76.1% completed and 6.5% outright no-shows across 6,428 booked meetings in RevenueHero’s no-show benchmark (published December 2024). The other 17.4% is neither held nor a no-show; the report says some of those meetings were still scheduled in the future when it was compiled, and does not break the rest down.
• By time to appointment: 80.79% held at one day out, about 75% for the first few days, about 60% by day 14, from an analysis of 6,414 meetings by Tito Bohrt, CEO of AltiSales, as reported by the Outbound Kitchen newsletter in May 2026. His original analysis, its definition of show rate and its date are not published, so treat these as one practitioner’s claim, not a benchmark.
• By industry: no-show rates run from 0% (healthcare, 179 meetings) to 18.1% (education and e-learning, 425 meetings) inside the same RevenueHero dataset.
• Cold-call-set meetings: no public figure we could verify at source.
• The reading rule: the show-rate 60/76 reading rule below turns those anchors into bands you can act on.

Every published sales call show rate figure, and what each one counts

Show rate here means held calls ÷ calls booked in the same window, so a cancellation and a reschedule both count against it. Most published figures are either no-show rates, which ignore cancellations, or undefined. This table puts each one on the page with its denominator and sample, so you can see which ones are comparable with your own number.

Two rows carry a stated sample and measure sales meetings: RevenueHero and the Bohrt analysis, and only RevenueHero’s can be read at its source. Everything else is either healthcare, undefined, or ours. That is thin, and it is the honest state of public sales show-rate data in September 2026.

What is a good show rate for sales calls in my industry?

RevenueHero is the only source we found that splits sales meetings by industry with the counts shown. It publishes no-show rates, not show rates, so these numbers tell you how often a prospect simply failed to turn up, not how many calls were held.

Three cautions before you compare yourself with a row. The seven industries shown add up to 2,794 meetings, well under half of the 6,428 total, and the rest are not broken out. Several cells rest on single-digit counts, so developer tools at 1.2% is three people. And the meetings were booked through RevenueHero, a lead-routing and scheduling tool; the report does not say how they were sourced, but meetings a buyer books into a scheduler themselves are the friendliest conditions a sales calendar gets.

The useful reading is the spread: in one dataset of scheduler-booked B2B meetings, real estate and education no-showed at roughly five to fifteen times the rate of technical software buyers. A single “industry average” sales call show rate hides a spread that large.

How does time to appointment change a good show rate?

Lead time, the gap between booking and the call, moves show rate more than industry does. Bohrt’s analysis of 6,414 meetings, which we could read only as reported secondhand, put show rate at 80.79% for calls booked one day out, around 75% for the first few days, dipping from day 5 and reaching about 60% by day 14.

The peer-reviewed evidence points the same way, from a different setting. McMullen and Netland’s study of 46,655 eye-clinic appointments found no-shows in the resident clinic rose from 9.1% at a lead time of 0–2 weeks to 38.3% at six months. The authors’ model predicted roughly a 2% fall in the no-show rate for every 10% more patients booked within two weeks.

A vendor, GrowthSpree, publishes finer bands (78–88% same day down to 22–35% at 14+ days) with no sample or method disclosed. Treat them as that vendor’s claim, not as research.

Reminder cadence interacts with lead time. In a randomised trial of 54,066 primary-care patients (Steiner et al., 2018), two reminders at three days and one day out cut missed appointments to 4.4%, against 5.8% for a three-day reminder alone. The longer the lead time, the more touches the gap has room for, and the more it needs them.

Does lead source change what counts as a good show rate?

Yes, and this is where public data runs out. RevenueHero’s meetings were booked through a lead-routing and scheduling tool, so they are most likely people who asked for the call, although the report does not say so. Calls set by cold outreach or paid social start with less commitment, so a show rate that is fine for outbound would be poor for inbound. We could not find a published outbound show-rate figure with a stated sample that we could verify at the source’s own page. Figures for cold-call-set meetings do circulate, but none we found could be traced to a primary source, so we have left them out.

Healthcare offers the only large-sample outside reference. The Dantas et al. systematic review of 105 studies put the average no-show rate at about 23%, highest in Africa (43.0%) and lowest in Oceania (13.2%). A patient appointment is not a sales call, but the finding that the most commonly reported predictors were lead time and prior no-show history is directly usable: split your show rate by lead time and by whether the prospect has missed before.

On our own accounts, appointment show rate varies by offer and reminder cadence — up to 93% on our best-performing accounts. That is a ceiling from our record, not an average or a typical result, and it sits above every figure with a stated sample in the table above.

The show-rate 60/76 reading rule: where your number sits

Because no single benchmark fits every calendar, we read show rate against the two sales anchors with a stated sample: about 60% at 14 days out (Bohrt, a practitioner’s claim reported secondhand) and 76.1% completed for scheduler-booked B2B meetings (RevenueHero). This is our reading rule built from those two numbers, not an industry benchmark. It assumes held ÷ everything booked in the same window, with cancellations and reschedules left in the denominator.

Read each lead source separately. A blended 70% made of 85% inbound and 55% outbound is two different answers, and only one of them needs work.

What does it take to benchmark my own show rate properly?

A trustworthy internal benchmark needs three things most CRMs do not give you by default: every booked call tagged with its outcome (held, no-show, cancelled, rescheduled), its lead source, and the days between booking and call. Setting up those fields takes an afternoon; back-filling 90 days of calls by hand takes roughly a minute a call, so 300 calls is about five hours. After that, a monthly read is under an hour.

Volume decides how often the number means anything. At 30 bookings a month, one month is too noisy to judge; pool a quarter. At 100 or more, a monthly read is fair. The counting rules for the denominator, and the levers that move the rate once you know it, are on our page on how to increase sales call show rate. If your number sits under 60%, the cause-by-cause tests are in why booked calls do not show up. Show rate is one of 17 stages mapped on our sales pipeline stages hub, and it is the stage an AI appointment setting service is measured on first.

Sales call show rate: frequently asked questions

What is a good show rate for sales calls?

For inbound calls booked within a few days, 76% or better is good: RevenueHero’s benchmark of 6,428 scheduler-booked B2B meetings found 76.1% were completed. For calls booked two weeks out, about 60% is normal. Read each lead source separately rather than as one blended rate.

Is a 50% show rate bad for sales calls?

Yes, for almost any calendar. 50% is below the roughly 60% reported at 14 days out in a 6,414-meeting analysis, the lowest sales figure with a stated sample we found, though it is a practitioner’s claim reported secondhand. Before you rewrite reminders, split the rate by lead source and by days between booking and call.

What is a good show rate for cold outbound meetings?

Nobody publishes one we could verify at a primary source. Measure outbound separately from inbound, and expect it to sit below the 76.1% inbound benchmark.

Are healthcare no-show benchmarks useful for sales calls?

As a reference for patterns, not for targets. A systematic review of 105 studies by Dantas et al. (Health Policy, 2018) found an average no-show rate of about 23%, lowest in Oceania at 13.2%, with lead time and prior no-shows the most commonly reported predictors. Those two predictors transfer to a sales calendar; the percentages do not.

What show rate does LeadsNow get?

Appointment show rate varies by offer and reminder cadence — up to 93% on our best-performing accounts. That is the top of our own record, not an average, and it should not be read as a typical result.