B2B sales appointment setting is an important part of the B2B outbound lead generation process. Carrying out research, creating an ICP and buyer persona, generating leads, personalizing email content, cold calling, cold emailing, tracking, and analysis, all of which is a process that is followed aiming to set a sales appointment.
Earlier, the salesperson used to do all of the work. With the evolution of the B2B sales and marketing world, now the part of selling and closing deals is left to the sales department, while appointment setting itself has become a new role.
In this blog, let’s see the definition of appointment setting, how to set appointments through email and phone, and the tips and tricks for successful appointment setting.
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What is Sales Appointment Setting
An appointment setting is a sales development activity that involves reaching out to potential prospects through call or email, and following up with them or nurturing them to finally set a sales appointment for a product demo.
It helps to create a sales funnel that contributes to the growth of a business. The person who is responsible to set an appointment with the potential prospect is called an appointment setter who usually belongs to the sales or marketing team.
After the appointment is set, it is the responsibility of the sales executive to close the deal following the meeting.
The Sales Appointment Setting Process
The sales appointment setting process involves many important steps to target the right prospects.
1. Defining your Ideal Customer Profile and Buyer Persona
You need to create an ideal customer profile or an ideal buyer profile. An ideal customer profile will help you to figure out your ideal prospect based on various criteria such as budget, revenue, company size, location, industry, and so on.
There is no point in reaching out to someone who does not have the authority to buy.
Creating an ideal customer profile helps you to align your products & services based on your ideal customers’ needs. In addition, you do not have to send all your leads to your salespeople. You can quickly qualify the leads and send only the sales-qualified leads to your sales team.
If you do not create an ideal customer profile, you would waste your precious time reaching out to someone who may not be your ideal customer. All your efforts will go in vain. Therefore, it is essential to create an ideal customer profile.t steps in outbound email marketing. Before spending your marketing dollars on prospect lists, It is important for you to define a buyer persona and carefully select who you want to sell to.
You can know the significance of defining your buyer persona here.
2. Find and Research About Your Target prospects
Once you have your ideal customer profile, the next step is to find prospects that match your ICP. Online directories, social and professional networks are some of the major sources where you can find your ideal prospects. You have to manually visit hundreds of pages on the Internet, visit thousands of profiles and check if those prospects match your ICP.
Once you find those prospects, then you need to build a targeted prospect list. You have to copy-paste the prospect data including name, company, title, and other information from the web pages into your CRM or excel sheet. It is a time-consuming and tiresome task but you have to do it because without prospects you cannot sell your product or service. Therefore, building a targeted prospect list is equally important in the sales prospecting process.
Do deep research in order to understand the prospects you have targeted. Follow them on social media and learn about their current pain points, business concern, and their priorities.
Deep research will help you curate personalized messages to prospects gaining their trust. Do not be generic with your content and avoid sending automated messages. Being more relevant and personalizing messages will create the right impression that you are aware of their current priorities and needs.
3. Reach your Ideal Customers
The next step is to reach your ideal customers. You either need an email address or phone number to reach your prospects. But most of the time, the prospect list you build on the Internet, social & professional networks will not have the business email address or phone number.
Decision-makers and C-level executives do not often leave their contact information on the Internet. In case, if you find them, it might be their personal email address. Research says that decision-makers seldom respond to personal emails, but respond to business emails. Therefore, it is essential to find the business email IDs and phone numbers of your prospects. However, it is not easy.
You need to have expert Internet research skills to find decision-makers’ email addresses and phone numbers. Nevertheless, you need to spend a considerable amount of time & effort. Once you find the missing business email address and phone numbers of your prospects, you can start reaching them via email or phone. But, it is not as easy as you think.
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Setting Sales Appointments through Email & Phone
Email:
Email is always an effective communication channel that captures the attention of your target prospects.
Always have a strategy in place for conversions and scheduling meetings…
- Create a tailored sequence of emails and don’t just stop with a single email.
- Create an email with content that is only about the value and no ask at all.
- Create multi-touch points in a day to get responses.
Apart from all the above, know when to reach your prospects. Try out a few odd hours and days of the week based on a trial and error method. Reaching out to your prospects at the right time will just boost your open rates and increase the success rate.
Phone:
The ideal goal of a sales development rep is to reach more ideal prospects possible and book qualified sales demos and appointments.
Once a sales demo is scheduled, it is the responsibility of an account executive to close a sale.
Some sales reps are responsible for both booking sales demos and closing sales. But sales reps don’t get enough time to multi-task.
Because sales development reps spend a lot of time on sales prospecting. They spend more time finding ideal prospects, building targeted prospect lists, and finding business email addresses & phone numbers of prospects. And end up having very little time to call on their prospects.
Also, sales reps have a lot of other tasks. Automating the sales prospecting process can prevent delays in reaching out to your prospects.
The faster you reach your prospects, the better your chances of converting them into your customers. Sales prospecting tools can help sales development reps with busy schedules.
Automated sales prospecting tools might help you to find your ideal prospects from online directories, social & professional networking sites quickly. It helps you to build your targeted prospect list 20x faster. You can easily & effortlessly find verified business email addresses and phone numbers of your prospects.
Tips to increase sales appointment setting by 3x Times
Sales prospecting tools help you to quickly build email marketing lists, cold calling lists, prospect lists, and email lists and increase your sales appointments by 3x times.
You can automate the whole sales prospecting process. Just schedule and the sales prospecting tool finds your ideal prospects, builds your targeted prospect list, appends missing business email addresses and phone numbers, and automatically sends your prospect list to your email.
If your sales prospecting process is automated, you don’t have to manually take part and you don’t need to spend more time on just prospecting. Sales prospecting tools help you to speed up prospecting.
Sales prospecting tools help you to build fresh prospect lists every day from any industry. Jump-start your marketing campaigns.
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