B2B appointment setters are seldom considered a necessary expense in improving business operations; however, hiring professional b2b appointment setters will be of great help to your sales and marketing departments. With plenty of fraudulent service providers on the web, it’s understandable why a lot of business owners would rather have their marketing people do everything instead of outsourcing this operation to a third party. But not all BPO companies are the same, and a quick research on Google would immediately give you a list of reliable b2b appointment setters. The difficult part is looking for a good appointment setting company that has experience with your particular industry.
When you rely only on your lead generation experts to set all the business appointments for your sales representatives, you will inevitably be sacrificing the quality of your lead generation marketing campaigns. Why? Because creating an effective campaign requires analysis, research, and a lot of A/B testing. All these tasks need a lot of attention and concentration by themselves, but if your marketing people also need to do all the cold calling and haggling with the gatekeepers, then something is definitely bound to give.
When doing appointment setting, no other method of communication is better than telemarketing. If you have a team of adequately trained b2b telemarketers, then you can have your own appointment setters. However, if you don’t have any, then don’t just pull an on-the-job trainee to do this for you. It’s a common mistake of businesses to drop every undesirable task they have on their trainees, and this never leads to anything good. You have to remember that when you are dealing with either your b2b sales leads or clients, you have to put your best people forward. This means you have to not only have capable telemarketers handling your appointment setting campaigns, you need to have experienced professional appointment setters setting up schedules with all your qualified business sales leads.
Your sales people can also be your appointment setters, although they shouldn’t ideally be. Why is this? Think about the most important tip when dealing with gatekeepers: do not sell to them. Most sales persons can’t help but go into sales mode when dealing with a particularly stubborn gatekeeper. This, of course, would compel the gatekeeper to further reject any attempts at getting an appointment. While you may have really good sales representatives who are well capable of dealing efficiently with gatekeepers, which would you rather have: let them heckle gatekeepers all day or let them use their superb negotiating skills on the decision makers and close the sale?
You can appoint random members of your sales and marketing teams to do your appointments setting campaign and it won’t necessarily ruin your business. But if you do so, you will miss out on a lot of potential opportunities had you allowed your employees to do what they were trained to do; that is, let your sales people close sales and your lead generation exports to come up with effective lead generation strategies.
