An appointment setter is essentially a telemarketer whose aim is to arrange appointments for you or your team to follow up on. They start with a database of contacts, ideally developed from your own lead generation strategies, and phone to arrange an appointment.
They serve as the middle of three stages in your sales process:
Lead generation is an important part of marketing your business, but setting business appointment is an equally important part of actually selling your product or service – especially where you have a more complicated product or service which requires a personal selling approach.
Using a telemarketer to schedule appointments leaves the sales people free to focus on closing sales. Skilled telemarketers are well trained to weed out unqualified prospects or those who are not in a position to buy. Provided they are given the right instructions, they can be used as filters – putting individual prospects into the right groups based on their readiness to buy.
Some prospects will require a sales visit. For others this would be a waste of everyone’s time. A skilled telemarketer can, instead, arrange for further information to be sent to this prospect or move them into a file for future contact.
If your existing database of prospective clients is a little thin, you may consider using a rented or purchased list of contacts. These lists can be tailor made to your industry and target customer. Make sure to buy from a reliable service that has taken the necessary legal precautions in putting together and managing its lists – a good telemarketing company can advise you.
In short, if you want to improve the productivity of your sales efforts, try using an appointment setting service for your next campaign.
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List Building Strategies & Setting Appointments & Telemarketing
Can Telemarketing Services Really Increase Sales?
Telemarketing services can help improve sales and increase leads generation,but you probably don’t want to turn your business into a call center.
Inbound Marketing Calls
In most cases the telemarketing that you’ll be considering will be outbound (i.e. you contacting the customer) as opposed to inbound (them contacting you). However, if you are not prepared to handle inbound calls, you may be wasting your hard-won marketing dollars. So you should train and prepare your staff to handle inbound calls effectively and keep them up-to-date with the marketing efforts that may lead to calls.
You may choose to incorporate phone contact into your current advertising, which may include:
Using a dedicated, toll-free number can be a great way to encourage prospects to get in touch, but your staff needs to be ready and prepared to handle those calls, answer questions and effectively funnel these initial leads into your sales strategy. For example, your advertising could promote a free report that customers can claim via a phone number.
Each call therefore represents a qualified, interested prospect, motivated to lift the phone.
Outbound Telemarketing
Outbound telemarketing (you contacting the customer) can be an effective tool in either:
A follow up call after a direct mail campaign can increase the open rate and also increase the number of sales. Outbound telemarketing also gives you the opportunity to up-sell your existing customers or target them with special offers.
Outsource or In-house Telemarketing
Few business owners look forward to getting on the phone and cold calling prospects (or even calling warm leads). It’s not surprising then that an industry has grown up to handle telemarketing services for small businesses. But hiring a telemarketing company is not an inexpensive exercise.
With that in mind, a good rule of thumb is for small businesses to avoid outsourcing telemarketing services- except where the value of a new client hits at least four figures.
For most businesses however, telemarketing will be done internally.
If it’s your own list, then the purpose of your call should be two-fold. Ideally you’ll have a product or service that you would like to sell.
If you have bought or rented your list then you can add an alternative goal: get them to agree to join your mailing / contact database. This will allow you to market to them again in the future.
Of course, you never started your business to become a telemarketer so ask yourself whether or not this is the best way to spend your time. If it isn’t, and you can afford to bring in some help, do so.
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List Building Strategies & Setting Appointments & Telemarketing
If you’re looking for more leads for your business, direct marketing might be the answer. It can be cost effective, help you reach out to new prospects, and deliver fast results. 
But it can also be expensive and it’s easy to waste your money on campaigns that don’t work.
To use it effectively, you need to plan your campaigns well and use the right tools for the right jobs. For most businesses there are four basic kinds of direct marketing worth considering:
We’ll take a quick look at each of them here but for more detail you can follow the links to specific articles on each topic – or feel free to get in touch to find out how we can help.
Direct mail is exactly what it sounds like – sending marketing materials directly to your prospects through the mail. Direct mail can be very effective at generating results and introducing people to your business. You can also use it as a way of keeping in touch with existing prospects and customers and selling additional services and products.
Good direct mail needs to make an impact – you don’t want it to be looked at as junk mail. You also want the reader to take a specific action. If you don’t have a specific action in mind, don’t bother with direct mail – or any other direct marketing for that matter.
Where direct mail works best is when you create specific mail pieces to target specific groups. The mailer itself should make an offer and make it easy for people to respond. Finally, you should plan for some kind of follow up – with either more direct mail or telemarketing perhaps.
To use direct mail effectively, plan it, implement it and then test, test, test until you find a formula that works.
Further reading:
Using direct mail to generate leads
Direct email often gets a bad name because people equate it with spam. So, the best and most effective direct email campaigns are those based on permission marketing. Permission marketing starts with the prospect giving you permission to send them further information – usually in return for a special report, sample product or other incentive.
If you use permission based direct email that is useful, expected and personal, it can be one of the best ways to turn prospects into buyers.
Further Reading:
Permission Based Email Marketing
Telemarketing can be used as either a stand alone tool to generate interest, build leads or arrange appointments, or it can be used as an effective follow up tool in conjunction with direct mail. On its own, telemarketing is best used for products and services with a high lifetime value. That doesn’t mean that they have to cost a fortune – it just means that the average value from the entire time a customer stays with you needs to be high.
You can outsource your telemarketing or do it yourself but either way you should look to keep the conversation simple, honest and to the point. You need a clear outcome in mind and to be prepared for rejection. Telemarketing is often even more effective when used in conjunction with direct mail. A well-crafted mailer can prepare customers for your call – getting you a better response rate than direct mail or telemarketing on their own.
Further reading:
Should you do your own telemarketing?
Using appointment setters
The last of the big four direct marketing methods is personal selling – often this will involve cold calling on a business-to-business or door-to-door basis. Although it is very effective, cold calling will not suit every product/service or every business. As with most direct marketing strategies you will need to be able to put a simple point across quickly and effectively and have a clear outcome in mind.
If your product or service is complicated, you may need to combine different types of direct marketing to create good leads, then follow that up with a sales call. If you do use cold calling, the last thing you want to do is come across like a pushy salesperson. Have a relaxed attitude, keep your message short and simple, and be courteous at all times.
Further reading:
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Email Marketing & Setting Appointments & Target Marketing & Telemarketing
Are you looking at buying leads for your business? If so, you might be asking yourself some of these questions:
If you are considering buying leads for you business, there is no shortage of people who are willing to sell them to you. A quick search on Google will give you over 45 million results.
Lead brokers (i.e. the people who sell leads) come in all shapes and sizes. In short, lead brokers market themselves in general terms. For example, they may advertise to people in search of insurance. They will provide general content and advice, and encourage people to provide their details for someone to follow up on. When people do provide their details, these leads are then sold to businesses that can actually provide the service or product.
Some of these lead generators will be tied to a particular company and others will sell leads to anyone who wants to buy them.
The benefits to you as a business that buys leads are clear. First and foremost you can get leads on demand.
If you know that you can convert 10% of the leads you get into new customers, buying 100 leads should result in 10 new customers. So long as you have done your research, there is no reason that you can’t buy as many leads as you want and grow your business that way.
To buy leads also gives you a fixed cost. If you market your business in the hope of generating your own leads, there are plenty of costs to consider – from creating your marketing and advertising to paying for advertising space, sending out direct mail or using a telemarketing company.
Depending on how good you are at marketing your business, this overall cost for each lead you get can vary. Buying leads can be a great way to build your business with predictable costs and predictable outcomes – once you’ve done some testing, that is.
Of course, buying leads does not come without a few drawbacks – otherwise that’s all anyone would do.
The first consideration is whether the leads you buy are of high enough quality for you to convert them into actual paying customers. If a lead costs you $10 and you convert 10%, then the cost of getting a new customer is $100. But if only 1% become customers, then the real cost is $1000 per new customer.
Before you buy leads you need to find out where the leads are coming from and how qualified they are. You should know what makes a lead a good prospect for your business – when you buy leads you want the best match you can get.
Here are a few more questions to ask before you commit to buying leads:
Even if you do get your hands on high-quality leads, there is one major problem that may be difficult to overcome – the prospective customer doesn’t know you or anything about your business. To them you are just another faceless company – exactly the same as all the others. You will need to find ways to set yourself apart from the competition before they are willing to buy your product or service.
Buying leads can be an effective way to build your business but the quality of leads can vary greatly. So do your homework, test new lead sources in small batches before you make any big commitments, and always follow up with your leads quickly. Of course, developing your own leads through a high-quality lead generation program will usually offer a better long-term solution.
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How to Buy Leads & Lead Generation & List Building Strategies & Setting Appointments & Telemarketing
Can B2B telemarketing services help your company attract new clients?
Should telemarketing be part of your lead generation process?
We all know a little about telemarketing – at least from being on the receiving end of sales and prospecting calls. But however we react personally to telemarketing, it can often be a very effective method for generating business. So how can you use it in your business and is it really that effective?
In most cases this is what people will think of when you mention telemarketing to them – someone cold calling to try and sell a product or service. Media properties with advertising opportunities, utilities and telecommunications companies all use cold calling as part of their direct marketing campaigns.
If you choose to use telemarketing to do cold calling then you should consider a few points:
Perhaps one of the areas where telemarketing is most useful is when following up a direct mail campaign or other contact (like a meeting at an exhibition or seminar). Individual direct marketing exercises often fail because they are a ‘one hit wonder’ – you are depending on catching the right person, at the right time, in the right mood and delivering just the right service.
This is a big ask.
Using telemarketing to follow up on these kinds of direct marketing activities gives you a second bite at the cherry and can massively improve your response rates. The downside is that it adds an additional layer of cost.
As a final, very specific example, telemarketing can also be used very effectively as a method of appointment setting. Appointment setting serves a few purposes. Obviously it helps set up appointments for your sales team to follow up on; but it also helps separate likely prospects from unlikely ones (saving time) and can even be used to gather additional information to be used in the sales process.
Like teaming telemarketing with direct mail, teaming appointment setting with sales calls can have a huge impact on the effectiveness of the overall campaign.
However you choose to use telemarketing services, the rules remain the same:
Follow those simple rules and business 2 business telemarketing can be truly effective.
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