Appointment Setting, Lead Generation Telemarketing Blogs

Skilled Appointment Setters for More Sales

You’re a manager or a business owner and you want to increase the sales your reps make by appointment. That’s a no-brainer, right? Set more appointments, they’ll talk to more folks, and The Law of Large Numbers will do the rest. They’ll close more deals, and what can be simpler than that?

But the trick seems to be getting them more “sits” with prospects. If you ask your sellers to do more dialing and smiling, that will be a drain on their time and energy, and they’ll say they won’t be able to squeeze in more meetings, which is your goal. Plus, they’ll growl that their highest and best use is in the field.

So, you seem to have two choices: (1) Build your own appointment setting service call center to supply a steady stream of appointments, or (2) Outsource the appointment-setting function to another company to set them for you.

A call center is not an easy business unit to run, for several reasons, not the least of which is staffing. Turnover, as you know, is rampant. I’ve consulted for call centers that suffered 100% turnover of phone staff EACH MONTH! This shifts your focus from creating customers to continuous recruitment and training, and that hoped-for, steady stream of appointments is more like an intermittent and unreliable trickle.

Examining the cost per appointment, you find it’s astronomical, and then you relent, shutter your phone unit, and call in the “pro’s,” those companies that do b2b appointment setting and charge by the hour.It seems like a reasonable and easy move, but this probably won’t solve your problem.

If you don’t pick your b2b appointment setting company well, you may find that the quality of the appointments is poor. Your people are dragging themselves across town or across the country to see unqualified prospects, and they suffer the humiliation of encountering a surprising number of cancellations and no-shows. At some point you scratch your head and wonder why you aren’t getting a sufficient number of appointments from ANY source at any price.

What’s going on, here? You and your hired callers don’t see the real challenge: It takes selling skills to set appointments. This is why it’s important that you make sure that your appointment setting company has skilled callers.

Specifically, a capable caller has to GENERATE INTEREST with a decent prospect, entice him with the PROMISE OF VALUE, ESTABLISH CREDIBILITY, and CLOSE for the appointment, and only then will the most time-pressed prospects open their calendar and agree to meet. Selling doesn’t begin when your field rep enters a prospect’s office. It must begin on the phone, to earn the right to enter the prospect’s office.

You need to put well trained salespeople on the phones. Until this happens, you won’t get what you’re really after. It isn’t mere appointments. It’s more sales!