Imagine standing on the edge of a mountain and shouting into the void. You feel you are loud enough but no one hears your voice and it disappears in thin air.
This is a common situation most businesses face, particularly while securing meetings, telephonic or in-person, with prospects. They often do everything to be seen and heard but in vain. If your experience is similar, don’t feel alone.
In today’s highly hectic and competitive business environment, securing a sales meeting can feel like navigating a maze – blindfolded! You don’t know what to do and where to go.
So, do you give up in such a situation and settle for smaller leads or continue chasing people in the same old fashion? Of course, not!
We have a smarter, and more effective way that is B2B Appointment setting which helps to to connect with fruitful prospects and keep your salespeople busy with appointments.
No. We aren’t talking about those generic, outdated, and typical pitches. Instead, we are referring to more personalized and human-centric strategies. Here’s more to it.
Advanced Prospecting Techniques to Improve B2B Appointment Setting Success
Setting up appointments isn’t rocket science. But it is challenging enough. Adhering to some basic, yet important strategies can help you thicken your chances of booking meaningful appointments. Let’s look at some.
1. Prioritize Quality over Quantity
Those days when people made or hired employees to make cold calls are gone.
Today, quality matters more than quantity.
Imagine making 200 calls during the day but being unable to book none! But think of making only five quality calls (to premium prospects) a day and scheduling two appointments.
You can make out what’s a better strategy out of these two.
Today, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve made 500 or 1000 calls during the day. What’s important is how many of them you could convert into a meeting or call.
Prioritizing quality over quantity plays a role here. It involves identifying the right prospects and connecting only with those who have shown significant interest in your offerings and have had meaningful interactions in the recent past.
For instance, someone who asks for a whitepaper or downloads it through a link can form a potential prospect you can connect with and attempt to schedule an appointment.
2. Use Intent Data Prudently
You can use tools like ZoomInfo to track online behavior and discover companies searching for services or partners like you. It helps you begin your journey in the right direction. For instance, if you see a company frequently visiting custom ERP software websites and if you specialize in it, you have an opportunity here you can leverage with a tailored outreach strategy.
3. Social Interactions
Use platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn wisely and strategically. Yes, they are meant to be used in a way that benefits your business. You can do so by following your prospects on these platforms, engaging with their posts, identifying their pain points, tracking trigger events, and using that to begin a dialogue.
4. Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
The ocean is full of fish.
But when you search for a specific one, you cannot cast a wide net.
Instead, you must go spearfishing.
That’s what ABM does. It focuses on selected accounts, researching their challenges, customizing messages, and including relevant stakeholders in your communication.
For example, while targeting a healthcare organization, you identify key decision-makers across various areas, including operations, administration, IT, HR, finance, etc. While approaching them, your messages include the specific pain points of each department such as seamless system integration for IT, talent management for HR, cost optimization for the finance vertical, and so on.
The Role of CRM and Automation in B2B Appointment Scheduling
Managing spreadsheets and scheduling appointments manually are the right ingredients for a recipe called disappointment! You create chaos and miss opportunities with such an approach. This is where CRM steps in. While automating things for you, it helps streamline appointment scheduling workflows and book more appointments. Here’s more.
1. Use CRM as a Single Contact Hub
Don’t restrict your CRM to a database. It may be capable of doing much more than that and serve as the engine of your appointment-setting process. For example, you can track prospect interactions, segment your audiences, and stitch a custom outreach strategy based on past interactions and engagement.
2. Automate to Expedite
Automation can manage and accelerate various repetitive tasks like scheduling reminders, sending follow-up messages or emails, and initial outreach based on set parameters. Nonetheless, never lose the personalized or human touch while automating things!
3. Efficient Scheduling
A smart appointment-setting strategy doesn’t involve asking prospects the time that works for them. Instead, it involves integrating the calendar with the outreach tools to enable prospects to book meetings at their convenience. Thanks to tools like Calendly that you can embed in your emails, simplify appointment booking for prospects at a time best suited to them based on their convenience and schedule.
How to Build a High-Converting B2B Appointment Setting Team?
Seasoned and expert appointment setters are the backstage artists of a successful play called Appointment Setting. Thus, you must also prioritize building an expert team. Here’s what you can do to create one and optimize your appointment-setting potential.
Look for people, partners, or agencies with a growth mindset and not just the number of years of experience. Your team must be curious, open-minded, able to handle rejections gracefully, and people-centric.
Preferably, hire a professional and trained team through a B2B appointment-setting agency in India. However, if you want to develop in-house skills, you must train your team through review emails, roleplay calls, real-world challenges, etc.
Create specialized roles. Don’t employ an initial caller to close deals, unless they are an expert in doing that. Segregate roles and let people do what they do best.
Dive deeper into B2B Appointment Setting by going through this blog – How to Choose the Right Appointment Setting Service for Your Business?
Personalization vs. Automation: Striking the Right Balance in Appointment Setting
Automation helps. However, going overboard with it can make your efforts look robotic.
On the other hand, go too personal and it will slow down your efforts and scaling abilities.
So, how do you deal with the situation? The answer is a hybrid approach!
Consider every task, the time you need to complete, the challenges involved, and the people required for each task. Accordingly, categorize them as automated and personalized. For example, you can use automation for follow-ups, outreach at scale, and meeting reminders. On the other hand, you can personalize the more complex tasks like voicemails, LinkedIn messages, and first-touch emails.
Remember, the key is to automate and personalize relevantly without losing time, and flavor, making too much effort, and reinventing the wheel every time.
For instance, while creating an outreach, begin with a highly personalized line or paragraph that connects instantly. After that, you can use your automated pitch. This refers to a hybrid approach where you personalize what matters and automate the rest.
The Importance of Multi-Channel Outreach in B2B Appointment Setting
Depending on a single outreach channel can restrict your opportunities and make you lose the rest, without you realizing it! Your prospects may be using different platforms actively.
For example, a CEO active on LinkedIn may also be found regularly interacting with businesses and people on Facebook! So, if you focus only on one platform, you may lose potential opportunities from the other. Thus, you must use different outreach channels to be visible and capture your prospects’ attention. Some examples include,
- LinkedIn + Email: Connecting initially on LinkedIn and providing more comprehensive and personalized insights via email.
- Strategic Phone Calls: Timing phone calls and keeping them concise and precise, while ensuring personalization to engage with the prospects.
- Experimenting with New Channels: Trying out emerging channels relevant to your business and evaluating their response.
You can also adopt a day-wise multiple-channel outreach strategy that includes;
- Day 1: Personalized email
- Day 2: LinkedIn Connect request
- Day 3: Relevant and specific LinkedIn message
- Day 4: Follow-up email
- Day 5: Attempt to connect over a phone call
- Day 7: Follow up call or voicemail + email if the prospect doesn’t connect
We remember blending LinkedIn InMail, and emails (with infographics and videos) for a company. Their response rate increased by nearly 40% in a couple of weeks!
Prepared to Do What It Takes to Book More Appointments?
Partner with DemandFluence. We are precisely the appointment-setting experts you need.
Our experience across various domains, tested and proven strategies, ability to innovate, openness to feedback, preparedness for rejections, and resilience that overcomes every roadblock make us a distinct partner in the appointment-setting domain.
If you want one, we will be happy to be your growth partners through comprehensive appointment-setting support and a strategic approach. Email us at hi@demandfluence.com and allow us experts to connect with you for an initial consultation.
