Closing sales involves much more than just a meeting between a sales rep and a potential customer. A big part of success relies on the preparation for these business meetings. The individual responsible for facilitating this process is known as an appointment setter, whose role is equally crucial as that of the sales rep taking the appointment itself.
If you need someone to organise effective business meetings with your prospects, but aren’t sure quite what to look for, keep reading!
How can appointment setting help your business?
Appointment setting is beneficial to your business in various ways. It can help you prioritise opportunities and focus your sales efforts, while speeding up the sales process. A personal touch can accelerate conversion by allowing for better lead qualification and relationship building, and help your leads understand the value of your offering.
What is an appointment setter?
An appointment setter does exactly what their job title implies; they manage appointment setting! Their responsibilities include qualifying leads, and arranging meetings and consultations between the company’s sales representatives and potential customers. They support the sales team by managing communications with prospects through email or phone, ensuring that all significant meetings are scheduled and recorded in the calendars of both parties.
What do appointment setters do?
Now we know what they are, what do appointment setters do?!
While specific tasks may vary between companies and your specific requirements, the list of duties of an appointment setter usually includes:
- Learning all about your company’s products, services, and all associated details
- Answering incoming calls from potential customers
- Contacting potential clients from your sales team’s provided data list
- Addressing inquiries from prospects’ regarding your company’s products and services
- Qualifying leads passed from the marketing team
- Organising qualified meetings between prospects and relevant sales representatives
- Making sure appointments take place and minimising the occurrence of no-shows
- Maintaining a detailed appointment setting database including a call log, background, qualifying details, and a calendar with all scheduled meeting dates and times
What are the key qualities of a professional appointment setter?
A professional appointment setter should combine great communication, organisational skills, and time management. If you are looking to hire appointment setters, here are some key qualities you should look out for:
Communication
Engaging in effective communication is key to good appointment setting, involving interaction with both potential customers and the sales team. Establishing a good rapport with colleagues and prospects requires essential soft skills, including empathy, confidence, attentiveness, respect, and active listening. Being skilled in both verbal and written communication is also useful, as appointment setters may engage with customers through phone calls or emails to both qualify opportunities and set up the meeting.
Time Management
Effective time management is essential for appointment setters to optimise scheduling and streamline workflow. Appointment setters must efficiently coordinate appointments within prospects’ and representatives’ schedules while avoiding conflicts. Strong time management skills are crucial for planning lead generation activity, organising workflow, ensuring timely communication, and coordinating meetings to facilitate a seamless sales process.
Customer Service
Great customer service can significantly impact appointment setting outcomes and sales success. An appointment setter’s ability to deliver great customer experiences conveys a positive impression of the company, ensuring their customer gets value from every interaction and improving rates of brand loyalty.
Business Understanding and Product Knowledge
A good understanding of overall business operations is useful for effective appointment setting, in terms of engaging with prospects and maximising opportunities. To handle prospect inquiries and concerns well, setters must possess a good understanding of your company’s operations, acquisition strategies, marketing initiatives, and product or service offerings. Being able to articulate the value propositions of your offering is key!
Objection Handling
Navigating prospect objections skillfully is key in securing appointments. Setters must know how to manage objections well, using different methods to reassure and encourage prospects,pre-empting common objections and securing appointments.
Outbound Calling
Being comfortable and skilled with outbound calling is crucial for appointment setters, especially paired with email outreach. Whether reaching out to prospects from provided contact lists or following up with contacts who have expressed interest, this task requires organisational skills, attention to detail, careful management, and the ability to explore and qualify sales opportunities, disqualifying those that do not meet the right criteria.
Goal-Orientation and Results-Driven Attitude
Great appointment setters focus on their objectives! Having a sales goal which reflects the sales goal of your organisation is crucial. Along with personal targets, having the overall revenue goal in mind is key to ensuring personal and organisational success.
Now that you have an idea of the essential traits your new appointment setter should have, let’s look at how you can hire appointment setters for your company.
How to hire the best professional appointment setters
Appointment setting is a crucial stage in your sales pipeline. Hiring the best appointment setters is crucial for representing your company effectively. Here’s how you can ensure you hire appointment setters who will be best for the role:
Confirm Necessary Skills, Qualities and Qualifications
- Previous experience in sales, telemarketing, or appointment setting.
- Exceptional communication skills and rapport-building abilities.
- Strong organisational skills and experience with qualifying to specification.
- Skilled in strategic targeting within various industries and target contact roles.
- Ensure they fit with your company culture by asking culture-specific questions.
Ensure Capabilities to Fulfil Key Responsibilities
- Check their ability to contact potential customers in a professional and confident manner
- Assess their ability to explore sales opportunities with potential clients, overcome objections, and build customer confidence.
- Confirm their ability to collaborate with your sales teams and meet performance goals and metrics.
- Confirm they can create customised outreach campaigns so that you don’t receive a one-size-fits-all solution.
Benefits of Outsourcing Your Appointment-Setting Team
An appointment setter does not need to be someone in your in-house team. Using an outsourced B2B sales specialist can be much more effective. Here are the advantages of outsourcing your appointment-setting team:
- Save time and resource. Start selling almost immediately without having dedicate excess time to training!
- Save recruiting budget.
- Greater flexibility. Access a team who do pre-sales full time
- Higher ROI from specialised expertise. Benefit from knowledge of a team who can consult you on the best strategy for success
Win New Business with Fast Track Appointment Setting
We’ve delivered B2B lead generation services to our clients for over 25 years using our tried-and-tested B2B appointment setting services.
Rather than just focusing on delivering numbers of appointments and leads, we measure success on ROI. Our number one priority is to help you win new business. This means our commitment doesn’t stop once an appointment is qualified and set up. If you run into challenges after having an initial meeting we’re happy to help by talking through strategy, or continuing to nurture the prospect and move the process forward through to closing the sale.
A thought-out appointment setting service is essential for effective lead generation and customer conversion. Let’s talk about generating new business and more appointments – just get in touch.
