Appointment Setting: What Is It and When to Use It
One of the most important parts of your sales strategy is ensuring you reach potential buyers. Appointment setting is a critical part of any successful sales strategy, as it can ensure your offering reaches the right prospects. It involves identifying potential customers, building relationships with leads, and scheduling meetings to discuss their needs and the solutions your product or service can provide. By developing a relationship and arranging face-to-face meetings with prospects, you can directly address their challenges and needs, making it more likely for your lead gen activities to result in sales.
If you’re looking to strengthen your sales strategy or simply want to learn more about appointment setting, keep reading to learn some of the benefits, best practices, and ways to improve your appointment-setting skills.
What Is Appointment Setting?
To expand your business, you need to get your products and services in front of potential clients. General outreach methods, while effective, don’t guarantee that your content will reach an audience that has a use for your product or service. Setting appointments is a sales strategy that enables you to get your service offerings in front of potential clients who are already interested in what you have to offer. Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) or sales team members set appointments by contacting potential customers, pitching your company’s service or product, and scheduling meetings with potential clients.
Not only does a streamlined appointment strategy maximize your sales strategy by ensuring your efforts reach an interested audience, it also gives you a chance to display your professionalism to prospective clients and show how well-organized your company is. Additionally, this strategy gets your internal sales representatives face-to-face with decision-makers early in the process, giving them the opportunity to show how your solution is the answer to their pain points.
While scheduling appointments is a simple concept to understand, appointment setting B2B can be a difficult task, even for experienced sales representatives. It requires a comprehensive, consistent, and sustainable strategy that involves a daily investment of effort connecting and building relationships with prospective clients. Strategies for setting appointments involve emails, social media outreach, and phone calls as well as lead generation activities such as market research, lead qualification, lead nurturing, and personalization.
The Benefits of Appointment Setting
If you’re considering making changes to your sales appointment-setting strategy, or aren’t sure how to begin developing one, below are some of the benefits of using an appointment-setting agency to fill your sales calendar.
- Increased Efficiency
Appointment setters optimize lead generation by bringing in leads who have already confirmed they are interested in learning about the product or services you offer. They also gather intel regarding needs and pain points to prepare your sales reps for the meeting. This allows your internal sales team to focus on closing deals with a greater number of clients rather than hunting down and searching for new leads and their contact information. - Reach Your Target Market
Typically, it takes multiple phone calls to reach a new lead the first time. This requires a lot of patience, time, and the necessary skills to navigate through various gatekeepers, such as secretaries, towards scheduling a productive appointment. A scheduling agency can use its experience and a variety of different methods to reach decision-makers and engage your target market. - Expand Your Network
Even if a contact doesn’t initially show interest, it doesn’t mean they won’t be a valuable addition to your network. They may already have a solution implemented, or it’s simply not the right time, but by continuing to nurture the lead, they’re more likely to be responsive to future marketing campaigns. Additionally, nurturing those leads may pay off in the future if they were to switch roles or move to another company within your target market. - Cost Effective
The numerous software programs available for setting sales appointments can be pretty pricy, but by hiring an appointment-setting agency, you can avoid those unnecessary expenditures. Pricing models vary between companies based on monthly targets, niche complexity, brand recognition, and more, but most sales appointment agencies charge a monthly retainer. Additionally, the monthly retainer is usually significantly lower than the cost of hiring and training in-house employees. - Market Research
Plenty of in-depth research goes into setting quality sales appointments. This research allows personalized approaches to be built for every lead and collects a large amount of data on your target audience in the process. Knowing what a lead’s concerns are, what questions they may ask, or why they say ‘no’ is useful information even if the lead doesn’t pan out. This data can be used to prepare for future sales meetings and should also be shared with other teams within the organization. Providing this information to your product development, business development, and marketing teams will allow them to build more efficient campaigns and products that address your target market’s needs. - Speed Up the Process
Setting appointments with B2B companies can be an arduous process, and trying to reach key decision-makers is especially challenging and time-consuming. An agency that has experience with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) knows who those decision-makers are and can speed up the process of arranging a face-to-face meeting with your sales reps. Appointment-setting agencies can also speed up the process of scheduling meetings with leads in locations you aren’t familiar with. If you’re going on a business trip or looking to expand to a new country, appointment-setting B2B services can fill your schedule with meetings in the new location to maximize your time and increase your results. - Scalable to Your Needs
Outsourced appointment-setting teams offer a lot of flexibility to suit your growing needs. You can quickly, easily, and affordably grow or reduce your team size or scale your activities up or down without the costs and time commitment that would be required with in-house teams due to hiring, training, and firing processes.
How to Improve Your Appointment-Setting Skills
Filling a calendar with quality sales appointments takes a lot of skill and determination. To help you fill that calendar, here are six tips to improve your scheduling skills and surpass your sales goals.
- Get organized
Define your ICP and have clearly outlined goals and objectives that align with your overall sales strategy. Use those goals and objectives to build your strategy for approaching and engaging leads. Research has found that up to 82% of B2B decision-makers find salespeople to be unprepared, so make sure you are adequately prepared before each call. You should have a well-rehearsed and informative pitch that anticipates hard questions. Understand your target audience, their industry, what they need, and how your product or service can meet those needs before you pick up the phone to make contact with prospective customers. - Qualify your prospects
Don’t waste time contacting leads that aren’t a good fit. Analyze ICPs and Buyer Personas (BPs) to ensure they’re a good fit and to extract contact information and new leads that can be used to convince them to schedule an appointment. A lead that fits your ICP and BP criteria well is more likely to be already interested in your product and agree to schedule an appointment, so taking the time to qualify prospects properly will lead to more quality appointments. - Find a way to lower their guard
Many leads will have their guard up when you first reach out, so practice techniques that help make them open up when talking to you. Show them that you respect their time by asking if they’re available to speak with you and be clear about why you’re contacting them. Be mindful – studies have shown that while only 17% of salespeople consider themselves pushy, 50% of prospective clients see them as pushy. You should also keep in mind that many leads may be put off by an attempt to schedule an initial meeting face-to-face. These can be difficult to coordinate and time-consuming, so start by offering to schedule a short phone meeting.
- Build up trust
Many leads won’t agree to schedule an appointment the first time you contact them, so focus on initiating conversations and building a relationship. Listen to what their pain points are and provide relevant information about your value proposition without being pushy. You can also share social proof to build trust with a prospective client. If you’ve had successful business relationships with high-profile clients, name-drop a few of them. Share examples of similar situations with companies that benefitted from your solution. Use reviews and testimonials as evidence supporting your solution and refer prospects to a landing page or website where they can see other customers’ feedback. By building trust with prospective clients, they’re more likely to be open to talking to you in the future, even if they don’t schedule a meeting with you right away. - Don’t forget to follow up
Your outreach activities aren’t done once you’ve scheduled an appointment. Even after you’ve scheduled an appointment, you can still send a follow-up email or phone call, if necessary, with any new information, something relevant to share, or any questions that may have come up. Additionally, don’t dismiss leads that didn’t schedule a meeting with you on first contact; continue to reach out and send follow-ups to those who showed some interest in your product or service. - Continue to improve your techniques
Track metrics such as how many leads were researched, how many were contacted, and how many appointments were booked. Consider their outcomes and conversion rates and use that information to improve your appointment setting script and strengthen your strategy.
Best Practices for Appointment Setting
To help maximize your sales appointment scheduling, we’ve compiled a list of the top five best practices to follow.
- Do your research (and then research some more)
Before contacting a lead, you should understand the industry they’re in, their values, motivations, and who their decision-makers are. Review their website, press releases, social media, and any other source of information that will help you make an informed, relevant, and efficient pitch. - Talk to the right people
You can’t pitch the product or service you’re offering to people who don’t have any purchasing authority. Find out who the key decision-makers are and focus your efforts on contacting them. Keep in mind that many companies have multiple decision-makers with overlapping roles, so you should expect to give your pitch multiple times. If your target audience is B2B companies, finding the right contact information can be challenging. An outsource appointment-setting team that has experience with your ICP can be particularly beneficial in this situation. Sales appointment agencies already have the connections and software you need, which speeds up the sales process significantly. - Listen to your leads
Giving your sales pitch to unsuspecting or disinterested leads is unlikely to give you many positive results. Build a relationship with prospects by listening to what they have to say. Identify their goals and values by asking what’s important to them. Ask them about the problems they’re facing that you uncovered during your research phase and use that to transition to your value proposition. Listening to your leads can also provide valuable intel that can be passed on to sales reps. This relayed information helps your sales reps be better prepared to go into meetings with prospective clients which leads to better results. - Focus on selling the appointment, not the product
The goal of setting appointments is to get prospective customers into a meeting with a sales rep. Once you’ve discussed a prospective client’s pain points, provide them with brief details about the solution you’re offering and its suitability for their needs. This prepares them for the next step in the sales process when the sales rep can give them an in-depth explanation. Build a relationship with the lead but don’t lose sight of what your goal is. - Be direct about scheduling an appointment
High-profile clients can be intimidating, and sometimes in an attempt to not be pushy, appointment setters can come off as wishy-washy. This only confuses the client and wastes time. Be upfront and clear about why you’re contacting them and ask them directly to schedule a meeting. If a meeting falls through, don’t take it as a sign of disinterest. Follow up with the client and try to get them back on the schedule.
Appointment-Scheduling Support for Your Company
Outsourcing appointment-scheduling can not only supply your company with more leads but also ensures your meetings are scheduled with the quality leads that are most likely to result in sales. Outsourcing this part of the sales funnel gives your internal sales team more time to focus on leads that are further along in the sales process and more likely to convert. Combined with the cost-effectiveness, scalability, and market research an outsourced appointment-scheduling agency can provide, the benefits are clear. By following our list of tips and best practices, and securing the help of an expert team of appointmet-setters, you can begin filling your calendar with more quality leads than ever before and get closer to your sales goals.
To learn more about how outsourcing appointment-setting can help your company meet its goals, schedule an intro call with us today!
