Ask your GTM tool or agency what's actually behind '94 meetings booked' before you trust the number

A meetings-booked number, on its own, tells you nothing. Before you trust "94 meetings booked" or any report your GTM tool or agency hands you, ask for the mechanism behind it: what triggered each contact, what decision got made, and where a human actually weighed in. If nobody can answer that with specifics, the number is an activity count wearing a results costume.

Where this comes from

The idea for this test traces back to a piece by Alan Ruchtein, founder of The Startup Effect newsletter, who argued that raw activity metrics (meetings booked, "high intent" tags) shouldn't be trusted without what he called a receipt: proof of the reasoning behind the number, not just the number itself. We could not independently verify the exact title or wording of that piece through a web search (it looks like it went out as an email send and isn't indexed), so we're not quoting it. What follows is MDR's own applied version of the idea, credited to Ruchtein, built around a discipline we actually run. Worth knowing too: the newsletter that popularized this idea promotes a GTM tool called Alta, so read the original with that in mind. We're using the concept, not endorsing the product.

The test

1. What changed. A named trigger (a funding round, a hire, a specific product launch), not "the account was on a list."
2. What context connected the change to the account. CRM history, fit, prior conversations. One alert on its own is not account intelligence.
3. What decision got made. "High intent" is a score, not a decision. A real decision names who to contact, with what hypothesis, and who not to contact yet, and you can inspect it or disagree with it.
4. Where a human entered. Look for judgment calls (checking a hypothesis, choosing an angle, handling a reply), not just someone approving a queue.
5. Which revenue metric this activity is actually supposed to move. If nobody can name it, the activity is decoration.

Before and after

Before: a campaign posts the account's highest raw reply rate, 19.5%, and gets waved through as the best-performing campaign in the account. Nobody asks a follow-up question, because the number is good.

After: run the test, and the same campaign's Positive Reply Rate (PRR), the share of contacted leads who replied with real interest rather than a decline or a "remove me," is 0.4%. Essentially zero. Every other campaign in that same account converted better on PRR despite lower raw reply rates. Judged on raw reply alone, that campaign looked like the win. Judged on PRR, it was the quiet failure sitting under a big number.

Industry average PRR runs 0.1 to 0.5% of contacted leads, "good" is 1 to 5%, "exceptional" is 5+ per 100 contacted. We track PRR separately from raw reply rate on every account, specifically because raw reply rate can say the opposite of what's actually happening. That's what the test above is built to catch, before you find out the hard way.

Run this on us too

Ask us the same five questions about any campaign we run for you. What changed, what context we used, what decision we made and why, where we stepped in personally, and which revenue metric it's supposed to move. If we can't answer with specifics, don't take the number. That standard applies to us the same as it applies to anyone pitching you a GTM report.