Revisiting fundamentals is good for business. External influences or new disruptive solutions cause trends to move, behaviour patterns to shift, and everything to be redefined. Take appointment setting, for example. While individuals who have worked in the B2B leads industry for a long time are familiar with the word, newcomers and novices have a lot of catching up to do. This blog is for you if you’re just getting started on your b2b lead generation adventure and want to be prepared.
“Isn’t it the process of accepting a call from a prospect and persuading them to schedutle a meeting?”
Incorrect Appointment setting is far more than just one call. It’s a multi-step process that involves interacting with a qualified sales lead, nurturing them throughout their customer journey until they reach the tight end of the funnel, and finally scheduling an appointment that will be handed over to a qualified sales professional to close.
What Is A B2B Appointment Setting?
“Wait, isn’t that what sales staff are supposed to do?” Isn’t it their job to nurture leads and close?”
Outside sales for B2B companies may be fairly challenging. To begin finalizing agreements, you must first fulfil numerous stages. Making one person responsible for all aspects of research, account management, client engagement, and email outreach can lead to greater employee stress and, as a result, higher staff turnover. So, if you want to maximize the effectiveness of your sales staff, make sure there are trained professionals who can handle the appointment-setting responsibilities. This necessitates the use of a B2B appointment-setter.
A B2B appointment-setter is a specialist that identifies and nurtures qualified sales leads until they are scheduled to meet with a sales representative. A B2B appointment setter’s purpose is to develop bridges between prospects and sales reps, ensuring better communication, quicker sales momentum, and removing any potential friction during the dialogue. Read this insightful article about B2B appointment setting tips.
B2B Appointment Setup Has A Number Of Advantages:
So, why is scheduling appointments so crucial to growing your business?
Time-Effectiveness.
Your sales teams may bypass the preliminaries and go right to closing with pre-qualified warm prospects who are well-informed about your company. Appointment Setting saves you hours, if not weeks, of time.
Improved Conversion Rate.
When it comes to impacting your prospects’ behaviors, information and nurturing work wonders. Appointments allow you to gently expose your sales leads to the advantages of working with you, reducing the likelihood of them abandoning your sales funnel. Further improving your conversion rate.
Precise Targeting.
You may hit the nail on the head with the appointment setting. Your B2B decision-makers will be nurtured based on their wants and aspirations, while your sales professionals will learn more about each potential customer, allowing them to complete a transaction.
The Procedure for Appointment Setting
The appointment setting process is multi-staged, to say the least.
You can’t just skip one and hope for the best because each stage is crucial to the end result.
Must Read: 15 Indisputable Reasons for Outsourcing Out B2B Appointment Setting
Onboarding
Instruct your appointment-setters if you want to ensure that they do everything correctly. Give them as much information as possible about your organisation, services, and unique value offer. Introduce them to deal-closing salespeople. At this point, your goal is to make sure that everyone on your team understands their role and how your sales funnel works.
Make as many onboarding materials as possible. All new members get access to everything from starter packs to in-depth knowledge bases. Allow no one to begin before they are ready with all the material on hand.
Targeting
Create an Ideal Customer Profile if you’re going to nurture and engage a new market (ICP). Our tutorial will show you how to do it correctly. Once your ICP is complete, share it to your lead research specialists, sales reps, and appointment-setters so that everyone is aware of the situation. Your appointment-setters should devote their time to learning more about the sector while your lead research team is busy obtaining and validating leads.
You should also describe the technological stack you’ll use to capture B2B data at this point. Tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator can suffice for some areas and boost LinkedIn marketing. More limited segments, on the other hand, may necessitate more specialized tools, which your appointment-makers must be familiar with in order to employ them in the process of nurturing or researching your prospects’ relationships.
Outreach
It’s showtime for your appointment-setters after your lead research teams have compiled a lead database. They must contact the database’s B2B sales prospects and identify themselves. Cold calls are an old-school strategy, we prefer email marketing. Cold emails allow you to include more information about your unique value proposition and add more creativity to your presentation without coming off as obnoxious or overbearing, and they’re often less invasive. According to recent research and polls, the average B2B buyer today is less tolerant with cold calls than they were ten years ago.
Instead of phoning, appointment-setting can build a series of email campaigns aimed at presenting a firm, outlining services, and encouraging prospects to contact and, as a result, book an appointment. This phase necessitates a high level of resiliency and the ability to think on your feet; you must establish a tempo that corresponds to the pace of your prospects and get them to respond.
Create many email campaigns to ensure that your outreach is tailored and covers all of your target audience’s pain points. Make testing a habit to determine which communication channel is the most effective.
Appointment Scheduling
You haven’t won yet if you get to this point. But you’re almost there. It’s quite near. Your prospects have agreed to meet with a sales rep at this point, so you’ll need a calendar tool that allows you to see all available time slots, change them fast, and share the schedule with sales people. This is why we stressed the necessity of appointment-setters and sales reps working together so that the former doesn’t have to reschedule in a hurry and risk generating a terrible first impression.
Occasionally, your meeting may be a no-show. That implies the prospects who scheduled a meeting with your sales personnel never showed up. This is why, in case your prospects forget or become sidetracked by other concerns, we propose sending reminders days and hours before the appointment. Always give your customers the choice to postpone their appointment. It won’t totally eliminate no-shows, but it will significantly reduce them and allow you to regain potential consumers.
Reporting And Debriefing
It makes no difference if your appointment-making techniques resulted in a contract or a no-show. Your teams must create a report that includes the following information at the end of each project:
- The total number of leads investigated
- The number of prospects who have completed the sales cycle
- The total number of emails sent (together with the positive/negative response ratio)
- The number of people that are interested in your product (complete with positive and negative responses)
- Each month’s number of booked appointments (or week)
- Time and money spent in total
If utilised many email campaigns, also share performance statistics for each one so you can see which one was the most successful and may be used for future comparable segments.
This stage should always be used to wrap up your appointment setup since it helps you to observe what went well and what went wrong. As a result, you’ll have enough knowledge to make your next appointment scheduling more productive and efficient.
Still Curious In B2B Appointment Setting?
Please feel free to peruse our blogs if you’re still unsure about the words and phases of appointment scheduling. This is where you can learn about both the fundamentals and the more advanced areas of B2B sales and appointment arranging. Please feel free to contact us at any time, and we will be pleased to handle any appointment-setting initiatives.
Must Read: Difference Between Lead Generation And Appointment Setting With Benefits.
Vikas Bhatt is the Co-Founder of ONLY B2B, a premium B2B lead generation company that specializes in helping businesses achieve their growth objectives through targeted marketing & sales campaigns. With 10+ years of experience in the industry, Vikas has a deep understanding of the challenges faced by businesses today and has developed a unique approach to lead generation that has helped clients across a range of industries around the globe. As a thought leader in the B2B marketing community, ONLY B2B specializes in demand generation, content syndication, database services and more.
