Sales Development is a general terminology that involves a range of functionalities. The fundamental concept behind sales development is that it’s much easier and more efficient to offer your products or services to someone who takes a keen interest in business compared to an uninformed prospect. It primarily focuses on the initial sales stages and is not linked with locking the sales. It doesn’t involve product, service, or business promotion which is the role of the marketing team.
On the contrary, the Appointment setting is deemed to be one of the most complex aspects of B2B business growth and also the most typical roadblock in growing a business by improving its ROI. The reason is selling your products or services to B2B leads is not possible without direct communication with the potential client.
To clear your confusion and draw a fine line between sales development vs appointment setting outsourcing, this dedicated blog post is all about sales development representatives & outsourcing appointment setting, their differences, use cases, and objectives.
What is Sales Development?
Sales development is the comprehensive process that incorporates lead nurture, prospecting, and acquiring lead data to align marketing & sales teams, brand awareness, and relationship building.
What is Appointment Setting Outsourcing?
The appointment setting is a more commercial and high-intent methodology that shares very soft connections with brand awareness or the lead generation process compared to sales development. It includes qualifying and scheduling appointments with the B2B prospects.
The Benefits of Sales Development Representative SDR
1. Engage Hot Leads
As sales development representatives are the main driver during the initial phase of sales, they are linked with the qualification and filtration of hot sales leads.
2. Stay ahead in the competition
Apart from sales prospecting and lead qualification, sales development representatives can invest a significant amount of time in dealing with social media, demand generation, and lead nurturing. Your competitors leverage different mediums to boost their sales. Therefore, your sales development representatives offer more opportunities to build trust with prospects, create demand & awareness for your products or services, and help your sales team in closing the deals effectively.
3. Streamlined training of SDRs
Sales development representatives often perform in a closed collaboration and share knowledge & experience with each other. It creates an opportunity to create a self-sustainable & streamlined training or learning opportunity for SDRs.
4. Lead Qualification
Sales development representatives have enough experience to predict whether a lead is of high quality or poor enough to neglect. It helps them filter most of the unqualified leads and consider only hot leads for further nurturing and sales consideration.
5. Streamlined Sales Process
Having experienced and skilled sales development representatives that follow a particular strategy or a roadmap enables businesses to standardize key areas of their sales development process. It can help you create an iterative and streamlined sales process.
The Benefits of Appointment Setting Outsourcing ASO
1. Build rich client-base
People choose to purchase from people they can trust. The most effective way to gain this trust is to impress your prospects with your work ethic and dedication. With the perfect combination of hard and soft skills, appointment setting outsourcing can help you create a comprehensive client base quickly.
2. Engaging the right prospects
An outsourced appointment setting service will help boost your revenue by landing you the prospects that match your buyer persona. A buyer persona is your ideal customer profile that matches their demographics, pain points, behavior, interest, and expectations.
3. Efficient Sales Funnel
The appointment setting serves as the fundamental aspect of your sales funnel by syncing your lead generation campaigns to your sales process. When approached in the right way, it has the potential to reveal how well-organized and structured your entire business process is. It creates a sense of authenticity for your business and helps you persuade potential customers to become long-term & loyal customers.
4. Better ROI
Another clear advantage of sales appointment setting is skyrocketing sales and ROI. An appointment setting has the potential to do wonders for any business by improving its bottom line in different ways.
5. Reputable Brand Image
With the right approach, outsourcing appointment setting enables your company to unlock new sales opportunities by scheduling a great number of successful sales appointments. Apart from improving sales and ROI, it also helps you establish a reputable brand image.
When to Use Sales Development Representative vs Appointment Setting Outsourcing
To opt between sales development vs. appointment setting outsourcing, knowing the differences between both domains is vital. Below are 5 differences between sales development vs. appointment setting outsourcing.
Objective
The prime objective of outsourcing appointment setting as the name suggest is to schedule an appointment with individuals or businesses who matches your buyer persona. Whereas, sales development aims at SQLs. The sales appointments are mainly aligned as the outcome of sales development methodologies. Therefore, appointments are the derivatives of sales development, not the primary outcome or objective.
Depth & Detail
A notable difference between both domains is the horizon they tend to cover. Sales development offers much more and is deeply incorporated into creating new sales cycles. Since the objective of sales development is the conversion of MQLs into SQLs, it performs at a much broader spectrum compared to the sales appointment settings.
On the other hand, appointment setting only focuses on the appointment. Therefore, the process hovers at the surface instead of going deeper.
Methodology
Sales appointment setting is a straightforward methodology. As an outbound appointment setter, you just work consider a list of leads and try to schedule appointments with them. Upon the successful appointment setting, the next step is to pass the lead to the sales team. On the other hand, an impactful sales development strategy includes a range of complexities as it’s recalled during each stage of the lead generation campaign.
Functionality
Sales development includes different campaigns, lead nurturing efforts, and calls to produce SQLs. Whereas, outsourcing appointment setting lies at the transactional end of the sales funnel. Opting for the right approach with the appropriate functionality is vital to address particular sales requirements.
Outcomes
The most significant difference between sales development vs appointment setting outsourcing is the impact. Sales development demands extensive dedication and attention and produces much better ROI in the majority of cases. On the contrary, an appointment setting often requires more simple activities. The reason is the complexity of producing SQLs compared to setting an appointment with cold calls or emails. The only trouble is that all sorts of investments or efforts in appointment setting and their outcomes are not always correlated.
How To Opt For The Right Approach
From the above-mentioned differences, it can be concluded that there are two instances where sales appointment setting can be a more efficient strategy.
The first is for businesses that have a defined and smooth sales path. You certainly know with whom you need to schedule a meeting. For instance, the company profiles in the B2B niche.
The second instance is where you focus more on activity compared to outcomes. The appointment setting didn’t produce fresh and hot leads, it greatly boost your experience and market exposure.
On the other hand, if you’re selling particularly selling a complex product or service along with a puzzling sales pipeline you need to generate demand. In the said circumstances, it is recommended to opt for sales development as the primary choice.
How Much Does SDR Cost vs ASO Cost
The average cost of recruiting in-house SDRs is between $6,500 to $10,500 per SDR per month. It doesn’t involve the additional costs you pay for subscriptions to various software utilities. Therefore, recruiting and training SDRs requires intensive time, budget, and effort.
If you are an SMB or have a simple sales process, a perfect alternative is to opt for the outsourcing appointment setting service and spare most of your valuable time, effort, and budget.
Outsourced appointment setting services charge on a cost per appointment and monthly or annual contractual basis. For comparison, the monthly expenditure of outsourcing appointment setting is roughly around $2,000 to $2,500 per month. On the hand, you can free your time and effort from training and recruiting an in-house team.
Conclusion
The aforementioned differences and comparison between sales development vs. appointment setting outsourcing reveal that you can settle for the much budget-friendly outbound appointment setter if you have a straightforward sales process. Otherwise, you can opt for sales development representatives who can earn you hot sales-qualified leads and assist you in each stage of your lead generation campaign.
