Do I need a B2B Appointment Setting Service?

Are you thinking of getting a lead generation company? We hope this blog gives you a bit of insight into your options. Essentially there’s 2 key parts to any sales process:

  1. Finding Opportunities – Finding people/companies who are interested in your service
  2. Closing sales – Getting commitment from Prospects to sign up

It’s actually the 2nd stage that makes you the money. As such, the idea is that your sales team only spend their time closing the sales. To achieve this, you need a steady stream of inbound opportunities or an appointment setting service.

To many companies, this sounds ideal. Just so you know, Appointment setting and diary management require a high level of integration between your sales and marketing teams. We explain a little further below to show you which might be best for you.

 

Why you should use a B2B Appointment Setting Service

We go into this in lots of our other blogs. As a Sales Manager, you need certainty that your sales team are going to make you a certain amount of money this month. A good way to do this is to tightly control how they spend their time in terms of:

  1. The quality of the data they speak to
  2. At what stage they get involved in the sales process
  3. What activities your sales teams does

Appointment setting means your sales team only speak to Prospects who are ready for a quote, a demonstration or a free trial. This is really good for you as a Sales Manager as you can pretty much guarantee that your sales team’s time is being well used. This does require a fairly high level of integration which we go into below

 

What to expect from a B2B Appointment Setting Service

First off you need to give the agency an easy way to access and manage your diary. Appointment setting itself requires a fairly high level of integration between your sales team’s calendar and the agency. Both the Sales Team and the Agency need to:

Use Calendly to give availability

First off, you can do this using Calendly. This is free and integrates with a lot of different systems, so it’s always a good start. How it works is that you select specific times your team will be available. You can connect this with your calendar as well, so it will block out any booked meetings.

 

What this looks like on the Agency’s end is essentially a series of available times to book

Do I need a B2B Appointment Setting Service?

 

Agree the handover point and qualifying questions

This is probably the most important bit, the transfer from the B2B Appointment Setting Service over to your sales team. What criteria are they qualifying on?

In addition to this, how are you checking that the quality of the leads are being upheld? One simple way is to add fields into the Calendly about the questions e.g.

  • What’s the current budget?
  • Please state the reason for changing?
  • Does the Prospect have a timeframe?

The good thing about doing this on Calendly is that the Prospect will see it too. This allows you to ‘fact check’ the Agency’s understanding versus the Prospect’s understanding.

Do I need a B2B Appointment Setting Service?

 

 

Sound too involved? Here’s what you could do before

So, do you need a B2B Appointment Setting Service? If the above sounds good then go for it! If that all sounds a bit much, you can get agencies who are able to book you callbacks or requests for meetings instead. This means that your sales team follow up on the Prospects themselves to book meetings instead of attending specific appointments

 

As it happens, we provide both Callbacks and a B2B Appointment Setting Service. What’s more we can provide a Web Chat B2B Appointment Setting Service on a Pay-Per-Lead Basis via Web Chat. To find out more, why not chat to use 24/7 via web chat?