Sales Appointments Today

When talking about Appointment Setting to potential clients we often hear the following statements or questions.

AI is coming: to the world of Lead Generation make no mistake a machine will ring you up and speak to you and you will struggle to know it is not a human. Automation is the way forward.

The Pandemic: and working from home mean you cannot get to speak to enough decision makers to make traditional lead generation techniques work.

Cold Calling is dead: we will all use LinkedIn, Facebook and social media to communicate.

It is just a numbers game; make enough dials and you will get a positive outcome from someone.

Trusted Advisor Why would someone trust you sufficiently to buy from you just because you ring them on the right day?

Understand our Business How can you understand our business in a couple of hours when it takes us 2 weeks to train an internal member of staff to do this role?

The Complex Propostion Our Proposition is very complex we would never consider outsourcing our Internal Sales function.

What do they mean?

Let us go through them. However first of all you should consider that in many ways these statements are simply objections that demonstrate the level of thought that the person you are speaking to has already given the subject.

In other words, they have already thought that the idea has merit but they do not understand how we overcome what to them are insurmountable issues.

The Complex Proposition

This often means that the person you are speaking to knows that they have to take the time to explain every detail, sometimes more than once before the customer eventually understands how the solution works or how some part of the solution works. It highlights to us that the close rate on this campaign by the client's sales team may be historically low.

Understanding the Business

This is nearly always raised when there are multiple activities that a business can assist a potential client with. It can be multiple products or services and there is then a need to be able to flex a conversation to these different areas depending on what the person we are engaging with is telling us. Often it can mean that in the past they have missed out on a sale themselves because they became tunnel visioned on a particular product, or could not answer a question about the product.

Trusted Advisor,

This is a term that allows us to understand that the way they sell their product or service is down to the way they engage with the individual. They depend on not selling the product based on just merits but on the service provision and expertise of their salesperson.

This can mean a number of things, The product is in a highly competitive market, the product is very similar to its competitors, the product is competing against much better-known brands.

It’s a Numbers Game

This is very much part of the received outbound engagement culture. When we hear it from a prospective client, we recognize a number of things.

It nearly always means that they have never really managed to define exactly who their prime audience is, their client's motivation for buying their product, they are now looking at the secondary audience.

It can mean that when they try to do some outbound work they spend a lot of time and energy with little return to show for it.

Cold Calling is Dead

When we hear this we know that there is usually a good reason it can mean that the market they approach is in the HR function of companies or that the decision maker is in the C suite and is usually well protected.

However, it can also mean that the salesperson we are speaking with doesn’t like picking the phone up they would rather do almost anything else.

The Pandemic,

This one is something that we really listen to if a company comes to us saying this then we know that they have seen a dramatic change in the outcomes of their endeavours.

It is often something we can help with, but it means we must understand more about what they have done post-pandemic to change their strategy to increase the number of decision-makers they are speaking with.

AI Is Coming,

Increasingly we are being asked about automation and bots. This is really the recognition that any campaign needs to use multiple potential engagement points, automation is great it works well to reach higher numbers of people. It needs careful setting up to be effective but can drift off target over time.

By using two or three channels to engage with potential clients we retain our focus but increase our contactable prospects.

What we do about them

The complex proposition is something that we deal with on a daily basis. The Internal sales role when it is outsourced looks to identify companies that either have a specific set of circumstances or a specific pain point.

Once we identify that our role is to set up an appointment for our client to meet with that company and put the complex proposition to them. We only need to understand what makes a good sales opportunity for our client, and how to present our client as the solution to the person we are conversing with.

Understanding the Business It is not easy to fully understand any business but we have processes that allow us to understand the elements of a business that are relevant very quickly.

We know the questions to ask in our briefing session to get the information we need, and we confirm that by creating a handbook for you to add to and edit. This handbook highlights several things, the company ethos, the spectrum of products and services the pain points they address, and the calls to action.

Of course, we cannot remember all of this, so we have a call approach. We structure this so it can diverge to any or all relevant subject areas.

At the most basic it can be something like this: I saw on the website that you were a forward-thinking company, we find a lot of our clients use us because of these 4 reasons, I am sure these are already on your radar but does one stand out to you?

If we have been tasked to always speak about a particular product first, then we of course do that, but we listen out for any key phrases that can guide the call to us positioning a secondary product or service.

We then inevitably get asked something we do not know the answer to. This is not a bad thing it demonstrates how interested the person we are speaking with is in what we are saying. We use this lack of knowledge as a reason to book the meeting if the person we are speaking can be qualified as a good sales prospect.

Trusted Advisor, Can you become a trusted advisor in a 5 minute call? Can anyone? I think it is possible on occasion.

However, it is not something we would attempt to do deliberately. There are a number of reasons for this. It is not the person that set the meeting up with you that should be the trusted advisor, it is the person that goes to the meeting that should fulfill that role.

We help to foster that belief by explaining that the meeting is with a specialist who can share their knowledge with them. We also use a consultative approach for clients using this approach, we do this so we can gather not only as much information about issues that they are facing but also what they have tried before and if there are any competitors that they are speaking with so we can equip our client with as much sales intelligence as possible.

It’s a Numbers Game we know this is partly true we also know that by working smarter we can make the numbers work for us. I can give examples of three things that any team can do to improve the numbers game.

Changing one word in an approach changed the whole understanding of how a decision maker perceives the approach the result of this was to go from 500 calls per meeting to 100 calls per meeting.

By improving the data so it closely matches the profile of the customers of the client can have a dramatic change. Recently we went from a positive response from 1 in 50 calls using standard data to 1 in 7 calls purely by building a database using highly selective criteria.

Relevance to the company, If you can immediately make the person who you engage with understand the relevance of your approach to them then they will be more likely to have a meeting with your client.

Cold Calling is Dead We would like to say that making an icy cold call or indeed any thoughtless approach to a business should be met with failure.

There should always be a number of reasons why your call, email, LinkedIn message should be relevant to their role and their company.

Make that specific to them in some way and your cold approach is no longer cold but is a direct result of something of interest to them. Even if it is that you saw their van driving down the road in front of you.

Of course, you should also find out if there is a preferred route to contact your decision maker whether that is email, LinkedIn, or mobile, and use that. In this way, you can make the communication relevant, with a reason for its timing and in a way that they prefer to converse.

The Pandemic It certainly changed a lot in business it has undoubtedly meant that receptionists are increasingly unable to put a caller through to a contact. However, it has also made it easier to get a mobile number or to be put through to their mobile. You need to engage the gatekeeper's help and be prepared to ask them to put you through to their mobile.

If they cannot do this then you need to have a call to action to hand so they can send a Teams message to your contact with a reason for them to contact you.

There are also a number of other data sources that have direct dials, mobile numbers, and Intent data all of which can improve outcomes.

AI is Coming We are increasingly using social media alongside calling to engage with decision-makers. Technology is playing a bigger and bigger role in how everyone engages. We now frequently are told that they are looking at our website while we speak.

It is very apparent that campaigns will increasingly need to have a holistic approach by first making sure the outreach, the client's website, and any collateral used has a unified feel that builds a prospect's confidence in the product or service. Multiple elements are now increasingly important to a campaign's success.

As an outsourced agency, we can provide you with any or all of these elements.