3 Reasons to Outsource Appointment Setting for B2B Services

In the technology sales world, you have more success in closing a deal when:

• You have the undivided attention of someone with buying power.
• Someone that is interested in the specific product or service that you have to offer.

That’s why B2B appointment setting is so vital to making the best use of the time of your high paid Account Executives.

Appointment setting. Sounds simple right? You set a time and place to consult with another business, virtually or in person. But if you have any experience with B2B sales development, you know that setting an appointment with an actual decision-maker is not so easy. Imagine what sales can do with that kind of lead.

You want to keep a steady stream of qualified leads in the pipeline and you are not getting the desired results internally. While the sales engine for your organization may be the most essential and intimate part of your business, relinquishing some control to a trusted partner to outsource appointment setting can lead to unexpected benefits.

In this article, we’ll look at three signs that indicate a need for outsourced appointment setting.

1. You Aren’t Achieving Revenue Targets with Current Staff

If you’re like most sales leaders, improving sales performance is at the top of your priority list. Waiting to improve lackluster results simply isn’t an option. You need a strong sales development team, right now. Moving the sales process along requires qualified leads in the short-term pipeline.

However, you may have gaps that need to be filled in your employee base. To use the old sales terminology, you may have a team of farmers focused on cultivating your existing customers. To be successful, you also need hunters who are going to bring in new opportunities consistently to your sales funnel through appointment setting.

Hunters:

• Emotionally stable /Resilient
• Optimists
• Self Motivators
• Best in Approaching the Right Clients
• Better at Communicating Value
• More skilled at managing multiple stakeholders
• More opportunistic

Farmers:

• Sensitivity
• Team Player
• Eye for Detail
• Pessimists
• Monotasking
• Solid
• Dependable
• Problems with explaining their services to a client

Maybe you’re asking your Account Executives to be both the hunters and the farmers. Or your marketing team or spend is not big enough to keep marketing qualified leads strolling in. You may have plenty of MQLs, but you don’t have any Business Development Representatives to sort through them.

These issues often result in your main team wasting countless hours chasing down dead-end opportunities. This affects the type of deals they’re able to close. Rather than consistently closing high-value deals, your deals might difficult to forecast for and earning low-margins.
Working with a third-party appointment setter can be a great way to boost opportunities (and morale) by supplying your sales team with high-quality, opt-in leads. THAT type of lead WILL result in increased sales.

2. The Dirty Data in your CRM is Wrecking your Productivity

Dirty data happens when a database or CRM that has inaccurate, missing, or duplicate information. Dirty data can also be a result of lead profiles that are spoiled by expired information, empty form fields, misspellings, or fake email addresses. Following the best sales tricks in the world won’t overcome bad data. Working with a tainted database will always feel like you’re moving one step forward, two steps back.

That kind of data certainly won’t help you close any deals. And, let’s be honest, dirty data is a reality for almost every B2B business. Dun & Bradstreet’s analysis of 223 million B2B records revealed some startling insights:

The average self-reported health rating for B2B data is a mere 3.2 out of 5

A validated third-party provider will guarantee data quality through a rigorous quality assurance process and strict adherence to targeting criteria. With the right data intelligence in your CRM, your sales and marketing teams can personalize their efforts and speak directly to prospect motivators and objections. Imagine how much better your cold calls would be if your team had thorough, valuable, and accurate data going into each one.

A quality appointment setting partner, will go through your database, scrub and verify it, and add and replace qualified leads that turn into short-term-close opportunities.

3. Your Demand Generation Efforts are not Producing the Right MQL’s

What does an MQL even mean in your company? Before a lead can become an MQL, it must first be a qualified lead (QL). An important rule of thumb in B2B tech prospecting is that you qualify the company first before you qualify the contact. Once the client profile matches with your established target, they can continue the process of becoming a marketing qualified lead. This is where things really start to matter.

A lot of companies begin making mistakes in funnel management at this stage. The right appointment setting service can deliver bottom-of-the-funnel qualified leads to your Account Executive team: one that matches fit and engagement and ensures that the appointment is with the decision-making authority (primary persona).

This can have a big impact in two areas of your business:

• Revenue: when your established sales staff can speak with the right person, at the right time, to their specific needs, it will help them close more deals and win more revenue.

• Conversion Rates: Your marketing team can spend more time nurturing existing leads to turn them into targeted marketing qualified leads.

You can learn more about the process of outsourcing your appointment setting services here

Choosing to outsource appointment setting isn’t a sign of weakness or questionable, back-alley deal. It’s pragmatism — using an available resource to improve your success and connect with more customers. In fact, some of the world’s most successful B2B vendors (Cisco, for instance) supplement their own efforts with a third-party appointment setting company.