Appointment Setting is the art and science of getting your appointment with the client, prospect, customer or other interested parties. Depending on your product or service you could establish appointments over the telephone or do live face to face meets. Get up close and personal with prospects. Appointment setting enables you to get in close with key decision makers in a timely fashion so that you are always speaking to leads when they are at the pre-opportunity point of the purchasing cycle.
The way I think of it is like this, you are the agent meeting with the client for the first time and they ask if you would be available the next week for a meeting. You say yes, but since you have not met them face to face, you are unsure of what their needs are and how you could best serve them. So, you begin the sales pitch. Now, at some point, the prospect says something like, "You sound like a great salesperson!" or they murmur out that familiar, "Thank you."
In all of my years of marketing I have never heard a negative word about appointment setting. In fact, it is the single most important aspect of sales and networking and it is usually undervalued. Many times companies do not value appointment setting as much as they should and end up using telemarketing, cold calling or outsourcing with the least amount of success possible. It costs money to set up new appointments and many times prospects are unwilling to go along with an unknown sales team even if they have a positive experience with them in the past. This is where a well-established outsourced call center or SMO can come in.
Outsourced appointment setting often works best for new businesses that are not quite ready to hire a full-time marketing team, but who want to grow quickly. A seasoned marketing team can get the job done more quickly by having in-house contacts that they can call on when needed. But for a new business or one that is growing very quickly, it may be better to outsource. A professional marketing firm can do this for a very reasonable price and still give their client the kind of service they are looking for.
So, why is it important to outsource appointment setting service? Well, it saves money. Using cold calls and other similar strategies is extremely expensive. Companies often put up a lot of start-up capital for marketing and advertising campaigns, only to find that it was unnecessary. If a company is only making qualified leads on a daily basis, then they are wasting money by continuing to do so.
When companies make appointment setting calls to large lists of prospects, they are likely to be missing some of those prospects. There are a number of ways for this to occur. It could be that the prospect hangs up when he hears your voice, or it could be that the prospect does not have much time to speak with you at all. While you are trying to contact those leads, your sales reps are already talking with prospects that may not be interested in what you are offering them. By outsourcing this work, you can let your sales reps focus only on those prospects who are truly serious about pursuing a purchase.
When you outsource appointment setting process, you give the process a more efficient direction. Appointment setters are much faster at getting a hold of qualified business leads than your own sales team. Plus, since a professional service will already have an idea of who they are contacting each day, they know exactly who they should be contacting each day to ensure that they close more business than they lose. Many experienced appointment setters also have a number of marketing tools in their arsenal that can help them close more business than they make. With more hours of efficient work, you can free up a lot of your staff to increase your overall production levels.
As you can see, outsourcing appointment setting is an excellent way to streamline your business and get more done in less time. It allows your sales team to focus on closing qualified prospects and gives you the ability to focus on marketing and driving new sales. Appointment setters are an important tool for creating a more productive business, and you should make sure that you're using them when possible.