How many hours does your sales staff spend in face to face time with clients? Chances are it could be as low as 4 to 6 hours per week. If the rest of their time is spent in finding leads and setting up meetings, you could make a huge difference to their producti vity by having professionals who specialise in those jobs take them over, and free your sales reps to sell.
Appointment Setting Services
Professional appointment setting services break the sales process down in distinct steps, and have specialised professional’s focus on each of those steps. Therefore, instead of having one person build a list of prospects, screen them, identify buyers in need of your product or service and in a position to make a buying decision, set the appointment, and make the sale, you might have a team do the following:
- Monitoring social networks and harvesting data to build a responsive list
- Nurturing those leads and guiding them through the pipeline
- A specialist appointment setter calling pre-qualified leads to set face to face or telephone appointments for your sales staff, and only then
- Then your sales reps closing the deal
Choosing An Appointment Setting Company
Consider the following when selecting an appointment setting company for your business:
A professional appointment-setting company will employ highly trained sales professionals with extensive knowledge and experience of your industry, not students in a call centre in another country.
They will use relationship managers who are mature and experienced enough to engage potential clients while diplomatically identifying those who are not yet in a position to buy.
They will profile client accounts, highlighting potential product and service matches, and provide your sales staff with the information they need to tailor their offerings to the clients’ challenges.
They will incorporate inbound and outbound telemarketing campaigns, enhanced by social media research to identify decision makers, prioritising quality ready-to-buy prospects over the usual suspects.
They will work with you to maximise your ROI, using targeted marketing, pre-screening and brand building techniques to ensure the leads delivered are sales-ready, and measure results against key performance indicators (KPIs).
Why Your Referral Network Is Inadequate
Word of mouth advertising and referrals will always be an important source of new business, and should never be neglected. If you want to maximise your results, though, you shouldn’t rely on your referral network alone, unless you enjoy the ‘feast or famine’ nature of waiting for referrals to call you.
However large your network, it will never reach every prospect in your industry. In fact, you’ll be lucky if it reaches a quarter of the market. If you want to reach the other 75%, you need to reach out to them. Also, your referral network doesn’t have the skill to screen out time wasters or clients who pay late, move the goal posts and generally cost you more than you earn.
A good appointment setter effectively expands your referral network by acting as intermediary between you and your prospect, preselling them on your value proposition, presenting your brand in its best light whilst evaluating the fit between you and your prospect. Most importantly, a professional appointment setter will only pass over leads that are ready to convert, and will position your sales staff optimally for that conversion.