Appointment setting is an essential business growth activity for all B2B businesses. If you want to consistently generate revenue and keep your pipeline filled with qualified leads, you have to have appointment setters making sales calls for your business. Have you mastered the appointment setting process yet?
Sales and B2B Appointment Setting—Tips and Tricks
While it sounds like an easy task to just pick up the phone and start calling, a successful appointment setting program requires hard work, a solid process, and a stellar sales team. If you want to increase sales, these appointment setting tips and tricks can help improve your chances of setting an appointment.
Strategic Prospecting vs. Traditional Prospecting
Prospecting is the first step in the sales process; therefore, it’s important to master strategic prospecting before you can master appointment setting. Prospecting consists of identifying potential customers with the goal of developing a database of likely customers. Once you’ve built a strong list of potential customers, you can then systematically communicate with them and hopefully convert them into customers.
There is a right way and a wrong way to do prospecting. Here is a look at traditional prospecting methods vs. strategic prospecting:
Cold calling vs. warm calling—While cold calling isn’t a bad thing (in fact, you have to cold call in order to set appointments), it isn’t the only type of calling you should be doing. Warm calling, or nurturing, is when you’ll set the bulk of your appointments. This involves following up with your prospects on a regular basis. To do this effectively, you need a solid lead nurture process in place.
Referrals vs. LinkedIn introductions—Relying on referrals alone for new business isn’t an effective way to prospect. Instead, try introducing yourself to prospects on LinkedIn and sharing valuable information about your business and how it could help them.
Sales letters vs. Email marketing—Not many people are going to respond to a piece of mail. Instead, design an email marketing campaign and send out messages to your prospects regularly.
Print ads vs. online content—Print ads won’t bring you very many new leads, but share-worthy content will. Online content is becoming so important not only because of its ability to reach a large audience but also because it helps your website rank higher in search engines (SEO helps drive website traffic; more website visitors = more leads).
Tips for a Successful Cold Calling Strategy
Once you have a solid list of prospects, you have to set the appointments. To set appointments for your B2B business, you have to understand how to be successful at cold calling. Here are a few tips if you want to perfect your cold calling strategy:
Train your sales reps: To be successful at cold calling, you need a team of sales reps who are trained and knowledgeable about the product or service you offer. Provide your team with cold calling scripts and train them on cold calling techniques before they hit the phones. The more cold calling tips you can provide beforehand, the better.
Build a process: Once your sales reps know how to talk on the phone, let your process take care of the rest. A process reduces what your sales reps have to be good at to do their jobs effectively. Let your process handle everything; when you send emails, when you make calls, who emails are sent to, and let people focus on what they are best at—communicating with people and building relationships. A high-functioning CRM can help sales reps and sales managers keep track of information during the sales process.
The Importance of Lead Nurturing and Qualification
Last but not least, make sure your sales team understands the importance of lead nurturing and qualification. Prospecting and cold calling are important, but if you aren’t nurturing your leads and qualifying every single one of them, you won’t close as many deals.
Lead nurturing helps you:
- Gather additional contact info
- Learn their buying cycle
- Find the key decision-maker
- Uncover pain points
- Develop a relationship
- Become a trusted resource
- Learn more about a business
While you can perform appointment setting activities in-house, oftentimes, sales outsourcing is the better option. By working with a B2B appointment setting company, you gain access to the team, tools, and processes that you may not have built out in-house.
Abstrakt Marketing Group provides B2B appointment setting services that help you close deals and grow your business. We have experience growing small to medium-sized businesses across various industries; we’d love to help your business grow, too! To get started with your very own lead generation and appointment setting program, reach out to our team today.
