10 Timeless B2B Appointment Setting Tips
In the competitive realm of B2B sales, teams have a wealth of techniques and strategies at their disposal. The true challenge is finding the approach that best matches a company’s distinct needs, target audience, and product offerings. Crafting a strategy that aligns with the unique dynamics of each business and market is crucial for turning potential into success and avoiding mediocrity.
In B2B sales, the journey to closing a deal is often lengthy, with days, weeks, or even months of conversations leading up to the final sale, depending on your product or service’s sales cycle. While the closing of a deal may grab the spotlight, it’s the pre-sale discussions that are critical for success—especially when it comes to setting up those initial sales calls.
Securing B2B sales appointments can be challenging. Prospects are inundated with calls, emails, and LinkedIn messages, making it difficult for them to see the value in spending time with you. However, without securing these appointments, making the sale becomes nearly impossible.
To help you navigate this process, we’ve compiled 10 time-tested tips for setting B2B sales appointments. Implement these strategies throughout your sales process to increase your chances of landing more appointments and ultimately driving more sales.
Bring the Right Attitude to Appointment-Setting
Larry Myler, in his Forbes article, highlights a crucial point: “You don’t NEED this deal.”
This perspective challenges the typical B2B sales mindset, where constant hustle and urgency are often emphasized. However, approaching your appointment-setting efforts with an air of desperation can be counterproductive.
Myler notes, “When prospects sense fear in your voice (fear of losing the deal), they instantly pull back.” Maintaining a composed, confident demeanor is key. Remember, there are plenty of potential customers out there. If one doesn’t agree to an appointment, it doesn’t mean you’re failing.
Adopting this mindset can significantly impact the tone of your outreach, whether in messages or calls. It might seem like a subtle shift, but the difference it makes in your interactions can be substantial.
Prepare a Relevant, Timely Pitch
In the high-pressure world of sales, it’s tempting to rush through multiple touchpoints with your high-qualified leads—emails, calls, LinkedIn messages, and more. However, if you move too quickly without adequate preparation, you risk missing out on valuable opportunities, as noted by The Center for Sales Strategy.
Preparation is key to crafting a pitch that resonates. According to their guide, “6 Tips to Help You Secure a B2B Sales Appointment,” you should draw on several sources of information to ensure your approach is both relevant and timely:
– Your prospect’s website
– Industry news
– Consumer behavior trends
– Social media
– Seasonality and Google Alerts for timing
– Research data
The goal is to make your pitch pertinent to the prospect’s current situation. Consider why it’s advantageous for them to meet with you right now. Are they undergoing a transition? Is there a recent industry change or a new research finding that impacts them? Do their social media activities indicate a specific need?
Take the time to understand why now is the ideal moment for your appointment. Then, clearly communicate this to your prospect. This level of preparation not only makes your pitch more compelling but also demonstrates that you’ve done your homework and are genuinely interested in addressing their immediate needs.
Open With Your Value Statement
In the world of sales, clarity is crucial. Your prospect shouldn’t spend several minutes trying to understand why they should buy from you; they should grasp it immediately. That’s why Michael Pedone, founder of SalesBuzz.com, emphasizes the importance of starting with a strong value statement.
According to Pedone, effective appointment setting starts with making your value clear from the outset. His article, “Appointment Setting 101: Your First 10 Seconds,” highlights the importance of a compelling opening that directly communicates the benefits of your service.
If your prospect doesn’t quickly understand the value you bring, they’re likely to lose interest. Craft a value statement that succinctly conveys the benefits of your offering and resonates with your customer’s needs. Knowing and articulating this value upfront is essential for capturing and maintaining your prospect’s attention.
Use Case Studies to Generate Interest
As humans, we are captivated by a great story. And when we see a story about an amazing result, trend, or a way to make our jobs easier…we can’t help it, we are curious and want to know more.
Nicole Mertes, VP of Weidert Group, says case studies are a top 5 effective tactic for generating sales appointments. She says, “Case studies appeal directly to what they’re looking for: proof of what you can do Focus on telling the story of how a project went, what the results were, and how improvements were implemented.”
By bringing up a case study early in the conversation, you get your prospect curious about how you managed to drive those results.That curiosity can keep prospects engaged longer and lets you use the other tactics on this list to get the appointment.
Spend some time before the call figuring out which case studies will be most relevant to your prospect. The more relevant the case study, the more convincing and valuable it will be.
Exactly when you bring up the case study in the outbound sequence is up to you. Key would be to test, and then test some more, on multiple prospects to see where you are getting the most response (clicks, call backs, or verbal affirmation) to introducing the case study.
Ask for the Appointment
Some sales professionals—especially those new to the field—tend to talk around what they want instead of addressing it head-on. But if you want to set appointments, you need to come out and ask for them.
Steve Stauning makes this point clear in “The Secret to Setting Appointments That Show.” This article stands out from the ones we’ve looked at previously: it doesn’t focus on B2B appointment setting. It’s actually about getting appointments to sell cars.
But stick with me.
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Stauning brings up a lot of great points that are applicable to B2B appointment-setting. For example, he emphasizes the importance of a sense of urgency. Your prospect needs to know that they don’t have all the time in the world to make a decision. Maybe you have a sale going on, or a busy season is coming up.
He brings up the importance of overcoming objections, getting a firm commitment for a specific time, setting a specific goal for the appointment, and how to use a recap to get a strong mental commitment.
This tip was intended for car salespeople. But it’s highly applicable to B2B appointment-setting.
Sell the Appointment
Your value statement tells customers why they should consider buying your product or service. Case studies convince your prospect that you can help them. But early outreach isn’t about selling—it’s about setting appointments.
So you need to make sure your prospect sees the value in setting the appointment. “Think about the last time someone called or emailed asking for a few minutes of your time,” says Steli Efti from Close.
“If you said yes, it was probably because they proved to you the ROI of taking the meeting. That’s exactly what you need to do when you’re trying to set more appointments.”
Before you make that call or draft that first message, take a minute to think about what return you’re providing on your prospect’s investment of time. Then make sure they know what they’re getting.
Automate What You Can
While automation in sales is a relatively recent development, it has become a crucial strategy for streamlining appointment-setting processes. Although sales cannot be fully automated, leveraging technology can significantly enhance your efficiency.
Chatbots, for example, are increasingly valuable in the realm of B2B sales appointments. As noted by Matt Duczeminski in his Apruve blog post, “The Best Tactics for B2B Appointment Setting in 2018,” chatbots can connect interested prospects with the appropriate sales representatives, expediting the appointment-setting process. Advanced chatbots now have the capability to handle inbound appointment scheduling autonomously, qualifying prospects and coordinating suitable meeting times with your sales team.
Outbound appointment setting also benefits from automation. Utilizing technology and services like iDataGuru appointment setting solutions can help ease the time burden on your sales team, allowing them to focus more on closing deals and less on manual scheduling tasks. Embracing these automated tools can optimize your appointment-setting process and improve overall efficiency.
Reach Out Using Different Methods
Outbound appointment setting is traditionally done via email outreach and phone calls. But to stand out from the huge number of sales pitches people get every week, you’ll need to do something different.
RAIN Group’s Bob Croston recommends mixing things up:
- Leave a voicemail
- Send an email (with a great subject line)
- Post a package – using Sendoso is always a solid choice
- Send a handwritten note – Wupp will do it for you!
- Mark up an article and send it
You could also reach out on social media, try to catch someone at an event, send a carrier pigeon . . . the possibilities are nearly endless. The point is to be creative and stand out. Not everyone responds well to calls and emails. Switch things up to get better responses.
Don’t Reconfirm the Appointment
This one might be surprising, but there’s good logic behind it. If you set an appointment a couple weeks out, you might be tempted to send an email reminding your prospect of the meeting.
It seems like a reasonable thing to do—you don’t want them to forget, right? But ZoomInfo points out that this gives your contact an opportunity to reconsider and cancel the meeting. You want to avoid this.
With good calendaring integration using Outreach, you shouldn’t have to worry about someone forgetting about your appointment. Don’t open up a chance to cancel when you don’t have to.
Find What Works for You
No piece of advice works for everyone. Every company, product line, and sales professional has their own strategies that work. Test out the advice above throughout your own sales process to figure out what works for you and stick with it.
And be sure to read our case study on how our appointment-setting service got over 150 appointments with companies like Apple, Tiffany &Co., and PepsiCo for one of our clients! It might give you even more ideas on how to set more B2B sales appointments.
B2B selling is a long process. Closing the deal gets all the glory, but there are days, weeks, or months of conversations that happen before the sale depending on your product or services sales cycle.
