Locking B2B sales is an overwhelming and dedication-oriented task. B2B sales, as the name suggest means selling your products to business. Therefore, it involves potential hurdles and extraordinary risks of failure if not approached in the right way. To move one step closer to locking B2B sales, you need to go through the comprehensive and strategic process of B2B appointment setting.
Crafting an effective B2B appointment setting strategy requires immense dedication and effort. You must stay objective, dodge the potential roadblocks, onboard the experienced procurement managers or business owners, and persuade them to get ready for a meeting. The rule of thumb is to get the stakeholder on board by scheduling a meeting instantly and before losing a lead.
What is a B2B appointment setting?
An appointment setting for B2B is a sales growth strategy that incorporates personalized inbound practices like cold calling and email follow-ups to schedule B2B sales meetings for your experienced sales representatives who are able to make impactful sales pitches according to the current scenario.
The primary objective behind B2B appointment setting is to pass on the audience research role and enable your sales team to focus on core sales operations & focus on hot B2B sales leads.
This is specifically fruitful if your products or services are much more expensive and intended for enterprise-grade businesses as such B2B leads require intensive nurturing and conversion efforts.
Appointment Setting Process
Appointment-setting techniques are a unique way to fuel the cycle of pushing leads further down the lead generation sales funnel. To acquire the best results out of any appointment setting strategy, your strategy needs to have the following processes as a pre-requisite for success:
Research & Define the target audience & niche
Comprehensive research about your target audience, their pain points, and expectations is the key to successful appointment setting. The process starts with the research of the target audience and knowing your market segment to craft a perfect buyer persona for your B2B business.
Afterward, you can craft an effective appointment setting strategy based on your research and buyer persona. It ensures your success and helps you find potential hurdles in the overall appointment setting B2B process.
Scrum Meeting with the Sales Team
Rich communication and knowledge sharing between appointment setters and the sales team prior to, during, and after the appointment setting campaign is another primary determinant of success. Before the B2B appointment setting campaign, you need to define the overall process, set goals, and clearly understand the sales team’s capabilities.
You need to make necessary arrangements and adjustments before the campaign launch. Collaboration during the B2B appointment setting will help you fill the remaining voids and keep the meeting on track.
At the end of each meeting, you need to reengage the sales team for further feedback, access the necessary changes, and implement these changes for the upcoming meetings.
Skills required for becoming a successful Appointment Setter
An appointment setter is an individual who works as an SDR in close collaboration with your sales team and performs a range of duties to set a B2B appointment between your business and the organization you are going to hook for sales.
These duties include acquiring and nurturing B2B sales leads for all the outbound practices, researching the target audience, and finally engaging the B2B leads on social media, emails, or cold calls.
An appointment setter must possess the combo of following soft and hard skills for an effective B2B appointments setting.
1. Goal-oriented approach
An average appointment setter has multiple things to take care of but the utmost thing to do is set a schedule with particular timestamps dedicated to various activities. He must ensure to consider differences in time zones between your company operations and B2B leads.
2. Able to qualify and score B2B leads
Before jumping on the bandwagon to make an appointment setting attempt on the B2B leads, an appointment setter must be able to deploy an effective lead scoring strategy and determine if the leads are qualified enough to be considered as SQLs.
Learn more about SQLs and MQLs
3. Trust building with prospects
An experienced appointment setter is able to create a trustworthy relationship with prospects. Trust or rapport building with prospects includes educating prospects about your products or services, assessing their pain points & conflicts, and listening to what prospects are trying to ask.
4. Able to deal with appointment abandonments
Objections and abandonments in the B2B appointment setting occur in a prospecting stage. In some instances, prospects lack enough time to consider your products or services or fail to acknowledge your deliverables’ true use cases. This is where an experienced appointment setter finds an opportunity to outrun an objection by using his/her soft skills.
5. Follow-up Emails
Scheduling a B2B appointment doesn’t mean it will going to occur for sure. Every appointment setter keeps an eye on the appointment abandonment rate, and the most effective way to abstain from occurring is to send a follow-up email. But, it requires having a fine balance between the optimum rate of sending follow-up emails and spamming the mailbox of prospects. The latter can exacerbate the event as you may end up frustrating the lead with too many follow-up emails.
6. Make impactful sales pitches
A skilled appointment setter knows how to make a perfect sales pitch. However, the whole appointment setting process needs to be crafted for humans, not robots. You should refrain from giving your leads a vibe that they are dealing with the algorithms or a sales-hungry company.
B2B Appointment Setting Tips That Increase Conversions
The following B2B appointment setting tips are known to deliver proven and promising outcomes.
1. Always find ways to schedule a meeting
Some appointment setters refrain from asking for an appointment, specifically after an apparent objection from the lead’s end. The best way to counter the objection is to offer an optional meeting to the prospects just in case they want to acquire more information or clarification about the company, products, or services.
2. Research the target audience
It is mandatory to invest time in researching the target audience & target niche. For example, the SAAS market differs greatly from the IT hardware market. In addition, you need to acknowledge all the conflicts and varying pain points of your potential customers that they are eager to resolve.
3. Personalized Engagement
After comprehensive research on the target market and potential buyers, an experienced appointment setter invests most of their valuable time in acquiring the lead data. This lead data is used to create personalized emails and engagement strategies to effectively connect with the decision-maker, procurement managers, or business owners.
4. Mention value and perks
Do not neglect the importance of highlighting the value and perks that your company is going to offer. It’s the most engaging way to hook prospects. You can change your prospect’s mindset by portraying your products or services as the perfect solution to all their problems. There is no better way to schedule an appointment with B2B leads.
5. Leverage omnichannel approach
Omnichannel outreach is one of the most impactful B2B lead gen practices you can leverage in 2022. For instance, social media strategy can light up your cold email, whereas an email follow-up can ignite back a cold call lead. It boosts the potential and quality of a B2B lead accepting interaction with your business and ready for B2B appointment setting.
6. Consider variations in timezones
In B2B appointment setting Timing is the kind. Particularly in cross-border sales, you need to consider the variations in timezones. You need to make your outreach efforts during business hours. Refrain from making outreach attempts on Mondays and Fridays as these are the busiest days in the whole week. Your prospects will find it frustrating to respond to your cold calls or email outreaches out of business hours or during busy days of the week.
7. Follow up outreaches
According to the research, an average successful appointment setting event requires eight outreach attempts. But around 8 out of 10 SRDs refrain from sending follow-up emails to their prospects after their 1st neglected email and abandoned call. So secure your place among the rest of those two appointment setters who remain optimistic and send personalized follow-up emails at the right interval.
Also read, How to Improve B2B email lead generation campaigns
8. Leverage graphical content.
You can experience twice more conversion rates by using interactive and graphical content compared to traditional content. Consider using infographics, GIFs, or video-based content to increase your conversion rate.
9. Add value with humor & memes
It’s one of the most effective soft skills and rapport-building techniques in a B2B appointment setting. You can use humor in your outreach attempts as no one prefer to engage in boring communication during their tedious day. You can use entertaining email subject lines, relevant memes, and trending GIFs. But refrain from making jokes around particular races, classes, religions, or nations. Draw a clear line between offense and humor.
10. Outsource B2B appointment setting service
A B2B appointment setting is not the core duty of your sales team. Instead of keeping your sales department in acquiring leads for B2B sales, it is recommended to opt for outsourcing B2B appointment setting services. Outsourcing an experienced and authentic service that offers appointment settings for B2B like ScaleYourBiz is the most effective way to boost your conversion rates and skyrocket your ROI.
Appointment Setting Cost
B2B Appointment setting scripts offered by outsourcing vendors are usually based on cost-per-appointment pricing structures or charged monthly or annually.
On average, B2B appointment settings service costs around $60-300 per appointment depending upon the scale of business, complexity of sales operations, or targeted niche. Therefore, you can expect to pay a maximum of $450 per appointment. On the minimum scale, you can expect to pay around $20 per appointment but with a compromised lead score.
Conclusion
B2B Appointment setting is an overwhelming task for any business. It includes different stages, risks, opportunities, and finding the right appointment setting service like ScaleYourBiz to gain high-quality B2B leads.
An experienced & professional appointment setting service offers a skilled talent force with a well-organized structure, proven experience of serving in various niches, and prepared enough for modern methodologies.
You can also train your sales development team to learn the aforementioned skills and necessary B2B appointment setting techniques, but it requires a lot of time and money for the whole training and recruitment process. The perfect way is to opt for a renowned outsource appointment setting service with a proven record of serving various clients successfully.
