Struggling to set sales appointments with value? While many small B2B companies have an outbound appointment setting program in place, very few know appointment setting best practices that yield a positive ROI.
Throughout this blog, we will highlight the best B2B appointment setting tips your SDR teams can practice. These appointment setting best practices include:
- Research the Prospect Before Contacting
- Prepare Your Sales Pitch Before Sending an Email or Making a Phone Call
- Use Various Platforms To Nurture Relationships
- Personalize Marketing and Sales Enablement Content
- Automate Tedious Sales Processes With Sales Technologies
- Streamline Lead Generation and Appointment Setting Processes
Research the Prospect Before Contacting
Before contacting a prospective business and key decision-maker, sales development representatives (SDRs) must do their research. This allows them to know who they need to get in contact with, what to pitch them, and what sales enablement assets to send.
Without researching prospects, you risk wasting time and money trying to track down the right leads. Researching prospective buyers includes gathering information like:
- Decision-maker name
- Decision-maker job title
- Decision-maker email address
- Company name
- Company industry
- Company size
Once SDRs have this information, they can nurture decision-makers with sales and marketing content relevant to their role, business, industry, and more. Nurturing the prospect with resources that speak to a pain point of their industry, job title, or another demographic will build trust and credibility. Once they see you as an expert in their industry, they’re one step closer to scheduling an appointment.
Prepare Your Sales Pitch Before Sending an Email or Making a Phone Call
Have you ever been invited to a meeting where it was apparent that the leader of the meeting didn’t prepare what they wanted to talk about? It can be awkward and counterproductive, right? The same can be said for making a sales pitch via email or phone call. Without preparing for a sales pitch ahead of time, you risk having a poor conversation with a high-quality lead.
After researching a prospective business, it’s time to prep the initial conversation. When preparing for the first call or email, it’s essential to consider what you want to achieve from this discussion.
For instance, do you want to set an appointment over the phone immediately? Or do you want to build brand awareness first and nurture the relationship with the decision-maker over time?
Understanding the goals of the first point of contact is essential for preparing the sales pitch because you can develop a talk track to help achieve these goals. When preparing the sales pitch, take the lead’s business and industry into consideration to showcase how your business has helped companies like theirs. This establishes trust and builds credibility.
Use Various Platforms To Nurture Relationships
Too much of one thing can be exhausting. For example, pizza may be your favorite food, but it probably gets old after eating it for a week straight.
Lead nurturing can be thought of similarly. While your ideal way of nurturing leads may be by routinely sending email drip campaigns, mixing it up with a warm call or sending relevant content to a decision-maker’s LinkedIn profile can be a nice change of pace and catch them at the right place at the right time.
Personalize Marketing and Sales Enablement Content
While marketing and sales enablement materials should align with your target market, sales reps must send leads marketing assets that align with their specific wants, needs, interests, and buyer personas.
Sending personalized marketing materials to leads shows that your company has a genuine interest in the long-term success of their business. Without personalizing content, you risk having a generic sales development strategy, making leads feel like another name on a call or email list. Segmented content adds value to each interaction, encouraging the lead to further their journey down the sales funnel.
Automate Tedious Sales Processes With Sales Technologies
Sales tools and technologies are necessary for an optimized sales process. Without a well-equipped sales stack, you risk missing out on high-quality business opportunities. The sales stack for an appointment setting program should, at the bare minimum, include:
- Customer relationship management (CRM) software: With CRM software, your SDR team can send each lead to the proper sales funnel stage, making sure they get the best sales and marketing content based on their decision-making timeline.
- Data enrichment technologies: Data enrichment technologies are responsible for helping SDR teams find more prospects to put into the sales pipeline. Without these databases, you risk having a slim sales pipeline resulting in few sales opportunities.
- Email marketing automation tools: Email marketing automation tools like Outreach enable SDR teams to spend more time selling and less time sending tedious sales emails. These tools are crucial for getting the most effort from your SDR team, allowing them to reach out to the right leads to schedule a date and time for a sales meeting.
By having this sales stack on deck, you have the opportunity to effectively nurture leads in the sales pipeline and contact the right decision-makers at the right time.
Streamline Lead Generation and Appointment Setting Processes
If you want to successfully grow your business, it’s vital to streamline and integrate lead generation and appointment setting services.
Simply having both these strategies isn’t enough to sustain a predictable sales pipeline. Aligning sales and marketing efforts allows your sales team to establish and continuously build top-of-mind brand awareness.
For example, let’s say an SDR sends a prospect a cold email or makes a cold call that directs them to your company website. When they click on the link, they’re referred to your blog for more insight into your industry products, services, and best practices.
Even if the lead doesn’t request a sales meeting after looking at your website the first time, they can be served retargeting ads on search engines or social media. This allows your company to stay in front of the eyes of potential buyers, ensuring that if they’re ready to take the next step, they know how to get in contact with your business.
Key Takeaways
Setting sales appointments is simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. For a successful outbound sales development program, SDR teams must follow appointment setting best practices, including:
- Researching prospective businesses before contacting them
- Preparing your sales pitch before making a call or sending an email
- Using a variety of platforms to nurture relationships with leads
- Personalizing sales and marketing assets to each decision-maker
- Automating tedious sales and marketing processes
- Streamlining outbound sales and inbound marketing efforts
Many small businesses don’t have the time, money, or resources to build, implement, and maintain a predictable appointment setting process. When they don’t, they look for help from experienced outsourced sales and marketing companies.
Sapper Consulting is a lead generation and appointment setting firm that helps growing B2B companies win more clients. If your business is struggling to grow, Sapper can help supplement your pipeline. Contact us to learn more.
