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You’ve got a great proposition, great service, solution and a fantastic way to solve your prospect's problems and yet they’re not lining the streets to get in front of you and the phone isn’t ringing itself!
Let’s discount the myth straight away that if you build it, they will come – it just doesn’t happen. In fact, regardless of how good you, your team or your business may be, if your prospects don’t know who you are, how will they ever buy from you?
Why is Appointment Setting so important?
Whether you’re an established business or a brand-new startup getting your team in front of new prospects is step one on the selling ladder. It’s a daunting task but every business needs to meet with potential new clients in order to sell, educate or introduce their company or product and start the selling process.
What a lot of businesses don’t realise is just how much of an art it is to get in front of these potential new clients– after all, they’re just as busy as you are! This skill requires delicate finesse as you try and persuade high-level decision-makers to give up their time to have a sales discussion with you.
Apply it to the B2B World
In the B2B world, it takes in-depth research, knowledge and persistence to book this meeting. For the decision-makers, the stakes are high, and the business decisions they make on what solutions, products and services to use have to meet certain expectations and quality checks. The likelihood is they already have an in-depth knowledge of the market and existing products, including your own and your competitors. Winging your call is not an option. You need to do your research, know your market and product and be able to handle objections.
Techniques for effective appointment setting
After over 30 years in appointment setting, specifically for the B2B sector, we’ve learned how to and how not to set quality appointments. It’s more complex than just picking up the phone and saying “are you available at a time that suits me”. There’s the gatekeeper to contend with, not to mention ensuring you have the right contact in the first place! Do you send an email first or wait until you’ve picked up the phone? Do you send lots of information? Or not so much? What do you do when they say “no, I’m not interested” because it doesn’t quite fit with them?
It can be a minefield of challenges to overcome when trying to appoint the right person for the right time with the right expectations. Objection handling, diary management, pipeline nurture, making enough calls, conversion rates, correct meeting details. There are so many potential minefields to cross. It is most definitely a skill, an art.
Where to start:
Start with the basics. Like most of the selling process, appointment setting as a skill also needs some core foundations to be successful.
These include:
- Quantity-quality balance
- Pitch and tone
- Data quality
- Know your message
- Know your prospect
- Pipeline management
- Experience
But as with any skill, there are certain tips and techniques which can be employed to help you master the skill quicker. Throughout this guide, we’ll explore some of these techniques and detail how they help set more, better quality appointments.
Quantity-Quality Balance
Lesson one for every appointment setting campaign, if you don’t pick up the phone nothing will happen! Even following up on inbound leads requires you and your team to pick up the phone. You need to make enough phone calls to give yourself a chance of reaching your targets.
It’s never been more important, however, to get the quantity balance right though. There’s no point making thousands of calls if the message isn’t working or the prospects have no need for your solution. Ensuring that your prospect data is well researched, well-targeted and relevant will increase your conversion rates and help create quality B2B Appointments.
Pitch & Tone
It sounds so simple but each and every phone call needs to be the best. Much like a shop front will either engage a consumer or won’t, a downbeat, monotone call can make the difference between securing a business meeting or not.
Going in too aggressive, or being overly cloying, can be the sole cause of an appointment falling through. The perfect pitch will be professional, personable and enthusiastic. Keeping the tone conversational, rather than sounding like a robot, will help make the talk more engaging too. And finally: always remain polite.
The perfect pitch will be professional, personable and enthusiastic.
Data Quality
Getting in contact with the right people is crucial for your message to resonate. Outdated or incorrect information has you on the back foot before you’ve even picked up the phone. And with data degenerating at a rate of 30% a year, without good quality data, you likely won’t even reach the majority of your prospects.
Before you begin an appointment setting campaign, ensure you are working with accurate and up-to-date data on prospects who fit your ideal customer profile. If you don’t already have an ideal customer profile, take some time to set out a few key details. Or perhaps, your ideal prospect profile will need to be bespoke to this campaign. Either way, define characteristics that they’ll hold. What size and type of business are you trying to contact? What job title and level of decision-maker are you targeting? Use these details to compile your contact list so you save time and energy by only contacting people who may have an interest in your product. For really effective appointment making, investing in data building or purchase can pay dividends.
And if the wrong person is contacted? Don’t throw the contact away. Instead, research and discuss with your contact, can they help you find the right person?
Know Your Message
With over 30 years in B2B Telemarketing, we know more than most how important it is to ensure that your message is clear, concise and relevant to your prospect. Be clear on exactly how you can help them and their business, have examples ready and define your call to action before you pick up the phone. If your solution can help them achieve operational savings be ready to demonstrate real-world case studies to peak their interest – remember setting B2B appointments is not about making sales on the phone but persuading the prospect to start a business conversation with you.
During your call, you are not focusing on your company and products. Rather, you’re focusing on the prospect. Tailor your message, ask questions and listen attentively to the answers. Take notes and repeat key information back to make sure you got it right.
Remember setting B2B appointments is not about making sales on the phone but persuading the prospect to start a business conversation with you.
Know Your Prospect
In addition to preparation on your own message, do your research on your prospects. Do you know their challenges, what they need to achieve, and what’s really going on in their sector? Preparing and tailoring your message based on prospect knowledge can make the difference between a meeting booked and “no thanks”.
Through conducting market research, you can anticipate the concerns and questions prospects will have and can prepare how to respond. Know who the decision-maker is, who their customers are, what they do well and what the target decision-makers' pain point is. Lead with that
information before telling them how your solution can help.
Pipeline Management
Also known as “short term” blindness! Yes, we really mean blindness! As we all know, in the B2B world very few decisions are made quickly, especially when investments, purchasing or business changes are involved. Be prepared to be patient at the outset of your appointment setting and realistic about your expectations – if your prospects invest on a 3-year cycle you’ll need to build and maintain a pipeline to be successful.
Experience
Appointment setting is much more complex than booking a date and time. Finding and keeping the staff (internal or external) with the right experience can be a real challenge. The right candidate will have the core pitch, tone and tenacity skills and be able to combine them with an ear for buying signals, objection handling techniques and closing skill.
Appointment setting in the B2B world provides a clear, trackable and accountable return on investment compared to other forms of marketing activity. In addition to qualified, directly targeted sales opportunities, appointment-setting campaigns build effective foundations for long-term sales success. Getting them right can be tricky, so getting help from experts like GCL, could help your business succeed.
Know What You Want
After talking to the right person, asking the right questions and offering the right solutions, you need to ask for the right appointment. But you need to know what this looks like. Is it a phone call, an in-person meeting, or a full presentation? You also need to know how to overcome objections or stall tactics.
The key to setting appointments is having a good confident caller who thinks of themselves as part of the Sales or Business Development Teams and can walk through each of the points highlighted above.
Taking a personalised approach to appointment setting with decision-makers can help build a strong pipeline, accelerate sales cycles and ultimately increase revenue.
How can GCL help?
With over 30 years of experience in qualified B2B appointment setting across EMEA regions, we’ve carefully refined our unscripted telemarketing services to give our customers outstanding results. Over this period, we have built our knowledge in a huge range of sectors and products, meaning we hit every campaign running. As B2B sales and marketing experts, GCL delivers bespoke, tailored solutions incorporating B2B telemarketing, data and insight for a holistic approach. To find out more, get in touch.
