What is B2B appointment setting?
B2B Appointment Setting is the process of scheduling a meeting between two businesses. The goal is to get your business and their business together for an exchange of information, goods or services.
The most common way to set up appointments is through email. However, most B2B appointments setters use an Omnichannel Marketing Approach to reach a decision maker by incorporating Linkedin and phone calls to their reach-out efforts.
What do B2B appointment setters do?
Appointment Setters have a list of companies they're assigned to connect with usually in the form of company name, contact name, phone number & email address. A good appointment setter will research the company and person they are about to connect with before reaching out to them to determine the fit of the product or service and any commonalities.
Three Most Common Ways to Set Up a B2B Appointment:
1. Appointment setting through email
Email is still one of the best ways to reach out to potential customers. What's great about email is there's no element of surprise to the conversation so the prospect will have a chance to understand what your offer is and if he or she would like to proceed with a meeting.
2. Appointment Setting Through Phone Calls
Appointment setting through phone calls is the most effective when paired with an email. Most people will be busy when you call them so using phone in addition to email is a powerhouse for setting up an appointment for your client.
3. Appointment Setting Using Linkedin
LinkedIn is a great place to connect with people for appointments. There are several factors to take into account when reaching out on Linkedin such as the strength of your profile and whether the person you're reaching out to checks his or her direct messages.
Different Types of Outsourced B2B Lead Generation Models
2. Pay Per Appointment
According to Cost Owl, B2B Pay Per Appointment Services can charge up to $500 per appointment. The typical range I've seen Pay Per Appointment Services charge in the digital marketing space is $200.
2. Pay Per Lead
While Pay Per Appointment is based on a qualified set B2B appointment, pay per lead will charge based around the amount of qualified contacts a B2B appointment setting agency can provide. An example of pay per lead would be providing a business owner 1000 qualified contacts contacts at anywhere between $1-2 per contact.
3. Service Level Agreement
Service Level Agreement B2B setters will create a monthly scope of a project that will typically range from 3 months to a year. Service Level Agreements vary greatly between lead generation agencies.
What's the difference between B2B Appointment Setting and Lead Generation?
Lead generation is any number of strategies involving creating qualified leads for your business to act on for new business opportunities. Some of the different types of lead generation methods can be Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click Ads (PPC), Telemarketing, Cold Emailing, Direct Mailers, Linkedin Outreach and more.
B2B Appointment setting is a specific and usually customized strategy to outreach targeted businesses with the goal of setting up meetings or appointments with prospective buyers in order to increase the amount of sales.
Here are 10 Reasons to outsource your B2B Appointment Setting:
1. Connect with a consistent amount of decision makers per month.
When you outsource your appointment setting, you put your lead generation on auto-pilot and have a steady outsourcing of connections with metrics to gauge how well the other businesses are engaging with your offer
2. Track Engagement of Your Email Campaign
One of the biggest benefits of outsourcing your appointment setting is that you can measure the success of each email campagns. Campaigns can be tracked based on openings, links clicked, unsubscribes and replies.
Another great metric to track when B2B lead nurturing is how many times an email has been opened. This is a great way to tell if a cold email you've sent has not only been opened but possibly being passed around to different decision makers.
3. Save Money on Labor
Outsourcing your appointment setting allows you to save money on your labor costs. When your business decides to fractionalize appointment setting, you are able to decide what service level agreement makes sense to your budget and won't have to rely on hiring a full time sales representative.
4. Increase Management Productivity
Hiring an outsourced team frees up your time. When you outsource your B2B appointment setting, your only concern as a business owner is to make the greatest product or offer input available in order for the campaign to have the most successful output of the campaign (massive amounts of appointments).
5. Stay Consistent with your Outreach
When you outsource your lead generation, you follow an agreed upon system that isn't as susceptible to downtime or personnel issues that having a full time sales exec might encounter.
6. Nurture Your Current Leads
If you've been in business for any amount of time, you know that there will be leads that haven't set an appointment with you but are still potentially interested in your product or service. When outsourcing B2B appointment setting, one of the biggest value factors is nurturing your current lead pipeline in order to keep your offer relevant in front of the most interested buyers.
7. Continual Growth of Your Network
Your network grows as you grow. Outsourcing your B2B appointment setting gives you access to a larger pool of candidates that will have your ideal buyer persona that you can continually remarket to even if they don't take you up on their first offer.
8. Find New Ways to Reach Old Customers
By outsourcing your B2B appointment setting, you're hiring a professional sales team that's full time job is to generate qualified leads in some times unique ways. Some of the great lead nurturing stragtegies can be something as writing a personalized letter to prospects, sending them a nice Edible Arrangement bouqet or staying on top of more tech savvy trends like a voicemail drop.
9. Focus On Essential Aspects of Your Job
When your B2B sales cycle is in place, you can focus on the essential aspects of your job such as creating new products, ideas or hiring great people to help grow your business.
10. Avoid Burnout
When you do everything yourself, you can quickly become overwhelmed. Hire a professional team to take care of your appointment setting so you can focus on growing your business.
In Conclusion
Your B2B Appointments setting strategy will be the heartbeat of your business. If the appointment pipeline is dry so too will your sales dry up soon afterward. Whether you hire a B2B lead generation agency to free up time or save money on a full time sales representative, you can never go wrong with a great outreach strategy in place.