What is an Appointment Setter? Your Sales Support for Sustainable Growth
Dalia Arroyo
As your company grows, finding the time to research, prospect, and reach out to leads becomes challenging. After all, a business can not continue to grow without new clients. Enlisting the help of an appointment-setting service can help balance the workload. But what is an appointment setter?
An appointment setter — also known as an appointment generator, sales development representative (SDR), or business development representative (BDR) — sets up leads to become sales. Their role includes outreach with the intent to build a prospect’s interest in a product or service before setting up an appointment.
Overall, an SDR can streamline your sales process, saving you time and contributing to the long-term success of your business. Here’s how.
Download the Ultimate B2B Appointment Setting Guide
Starting a sales development process can be daunting, but with the right strategy, you’ll boost your sales conversion rates in no time.
Appointment Setter Duties: Setting Sales Up for Success
Appointment setter duties include cold calling leads and qualifying them to become sales-qualified leads (SQLs.) Once that’s accomplished, they help set up appointments with notes to pass along to sales so closers can do what they do best: close.
Prospecting & Lead Generation
Many business owners and salespeople are often too busy to put in the hours necessary to warm a lead from the ground up. Appointment setters do the leg work in targeting contacts through cold calling. During that process, they also handle objections, qualify leads, and gauge each prospect’s level of interest.
Pursuing Marketing-Qualified Leads
Consumers who engage with marketing efforts are likelier to purchase from a company, provide positive feedback, and become repeat buyers. So not following up on marketing-qualified leads is like leaving money on the table. Fortunately, in addition to cold calling SDRs will follow up on valuable contact information obtained from your marketing efforts to decipher who has serious interest vs. who isn’t a good pursuit.
Getting Past the Gatekeeper
Sometimes, a piece of contact information doesn’t lead directly to the decision maker that can close a sale. Assistants, secretaries, receptionists: these can all act as gatekeepers that can shut down a possible prospect. Appointment setters know how to work the conversation to help move past the gatekeepers and keep the pipeline flowing.
Qualifying Leads with Precision
Not all leads are a good match for your business. Thankfully, SDRs can help you find the right ones with lead qualification. Qualifying leads begins with identifying the potential client’s needs and budget. From there, appointment setters ask discovery questions to determine if the lead matches the ideal customer profile. For those who do, SDRs push them further down the sales pipeline.
Following Up with Sales Cadence
Qualifying leads isn’t an easy task. It takes a delicate balance of persistence and professionalism. The best appointment setters are practiced in sales cadence, a systematic application of communication touchpoints over a certain period. Being patient and consistently communicating helps ensure success considering 60% of customers will say “no” before saying “yes.”
Scheduling Sales Appointments
Once a qualified lead is identified, an appointment setter utilizes a warm handoff transition to move them to the next stage in the pipeline. This includes creating a detailed sales profile in a CRM and meeting with sales to establish an onboarding plan while identifying any roadblocks or issues they can foresee. Furthermore, they will set up a transition meeting with themselves, the prospect, and a salesperson where introductions are met and the salesperson can take it from there.
Is Outsourcing Appointment Setting Right for You?
Adding appointment setters to your team could help streamline your operations and increase sales. However, building a team of SDRs internally is not always the best option for businesses.
The Society for Human Resource Management estimates the average cost of recruiting is about $4,700 per new employee. On the other hand, outsourcing appointment setting gives you access to a team of already trained and qualified SDRs at a single cost. Plus, you get the benefit of onboarding a fully trained team, saving your most precious resource: time.
With EBQ’s appointment setting services, you also get the added benefits of our proprietary data services. That means no longer needing to spend time or money sourcing contact lists or cleaning your data.
Download the Ultimate B2B Appointment Setting Guide
Starting a sales development process can be daunting, but with the right strategy, you’ll boost your sales conversion rates in no time.
EBQ for B2B Appointment Setting
An appointment setter will bear the burden of cold calling and reaching out to marketing leads so your business can find new prospects to keep growing. From prospecting to facilitating a smooth handoff transition, they are essential support for your sales team’s success. If you don’t have the resources to hire a team of SDRs, outsourcing your appointment setting can be an elegant solution for accessing that support.
EBQ’s sales development representatives are specially trained to qualify leads and seamlessly integrate them into your business. Learn more about our appointment setting services to find out how our proven processes set us apart from other SDR outsourcing firms.
About the Author:
Dalia is EBQ’s VP of Business Development with over 10 years of experience in customer service. After forming the Customer Experience division, she achieved over $1.2M in revenue within the first six months under her leadership.