Does your IT business need help from a professional appointment-setting service?
The purpose of this article is to help you decide if you do or not.
It’s crucial to avoid mistakes in the early stages of your company’s relationships with prospects. Sales and profits will drop if you don’t get new appointments as often as you convert the hot leads in your current pipeline.
Your internal sales team can book these appointments, but taking this burden off their shoulders gives them time to concentrate on the latter stages of the sale.
In other cases, you might have a team that’s awesome at handling tech issues, but they cringe when you ask them to help with cold calling.
But first, let’s break down what appointment setting means for IT/managed service providers.
What Is An Appointment-Setting Service?
The sales process starts with a lead, meaning the contacts you have are all leads until you take the next step and convert them to prospects. To turn a lead into a sales prospect, you’ll need to persuade them to book an appointment where you then discuss your offer further.
The main objective of an appointment-setting service is to book these appointments using an external team so that your internal team can focus on on-site assessments, servicing customers, and other operations.
The external sales reps who help you set up these appointments have done it for many companies numerous times, so they know how to handle all situations, from anger to reluctance. They also create a first impression for your brand as they approach the task professionally. This allows your internal sales team to pick up the conversation in a friendlier atmosphere.
Here are some things external sales reps do before and during the appointment-setting process.
Crucial Steps For Appointment Setting
Lead Selection
An IT/managed service provider like you might be targeting different industries, from government agencies to non-profits and even larger IT firms. The sales rep gathers details about the brands you’re prospecting, from their size to their IT infrastructure, and creates a custom phone script to increase the chances of persuading that prospect to book an appointment.
Selecting An Appointment Type
The sales rep will ask you what type of appointments you want prospects to book, whether on the phone or in person. When the team starts calling these prospects, they start with those likely to accept the type of appointment you chose. After exhausting that list, the sales reps move to the contacts that need more convincing.
Outreach Reporting
You’ll have regular meetings to receive reports on the campaign progression and make changes where necessary.
What Should IT Managed Service Providers Look For In Appointment Setting Partners?
When you set up sales appointments, your ideal is to create a platform where you can talk to your prospects directly and receive immediate feedback, unlike other forms of marketing. Other benefits should be:
Better ROI
A seasoned sales rep researches the needs of your prospects so they can describe your solution according to their needs. This increases the chances of getting an appointment with that client. Secondly, your appointment setting service provider has better cost control. It also has scalability because you can start your appointment outreach with a small number of leads and scale up after the success of the first campaign.
Lowers Company Overhead
An external team helps with reducing fixed overhead.
It cuts back on the costs of hiring, employee incentives, human resource management, and the constant training needed to maintain a competent cold-calling sales team. Plus, you won’t incur technology costs to run modern prospecting services as it’s up to the provider to invest in the best. There’ll also be no costly maintenance and repairs for such technology.
A Motivated In-house Sales Team
The sales department may have a high turnover when the workload overwhelms your team. Productivity may also decrease due to the stress of cold-calling reluctant leads. Consequently, with the right partnership, having support for appointment scheduling makes the work less stressful for the internal team.
Prospecting Using A Custom Script
When you outsource the appointment-setting process, the sales rep takes the time to learn about your services and your target buyers to create a call script suitable for the lead.
Potential to Reach A New Market
Sometimes, prospects don’t even know they need an MSP. It’s up to the sales rep to shine a light on the benefits of working with one. Winning interest with this kind of prospect takes knowledge, patience, and persuasion skills, which seasoned sales reps possess.
Better Lead Quality
The external sales reps analyze a call list thoroughly to maximize its quality and lower the cost of outreach. Further, the sales metrics will help you create new sales goals.
What Makes A Good Appointment Setter?
Imagine taking the workload off your internal sales team only to get mediocre appointment setters who don’t generate as many sales appointments as you expected or can’t handle prospects for IT/managed service providers.
Here’s what makes a good appointment-setting provider.
Expertise
Choose a brand that understands MSPs. Check the company’s portfolio to see its achievements, previous clients, and success rate.
Beyond experience, look at the reputation of the company.
Transparency
You should know when the outreach will start, the expected outcome, who will lead your campaign, and how long the outreach will last. On top of that, you should know the tools they’ll use in your campaign and the data sources they’ll use.
When such information is unclear, you’re likely to get disappointing results.
Reliability
There’s no need for a service provider to promise the moon while aiming for the rooftops. The company should offer a dedicated manager and regular reports.
Integration & Synergy
Booking an appointment is part of the sales workflow, so it must integrate into the other tasks your internal sales team will take on afterward. If the appointment-setting process isn’t in sync with what you’re doing in-house, you may run out of appointments or have too many booked and overwhelm your team. For these reasons, ask the appointment setter how they map out the process.
Final Thoughts
If all of the above sounds like it could meet your needs, you’re likely to succeed by working with an appointment-setting service. If it doesn’t, you may be better off keeping things in-house.
So ask yourself – can your sales team be more efficient with a team setting appointments for them?
You’ll have skillful sales reps using the most efficient technology to set up appointments. It’ll increase the frequency of sales as you’ll have more appointments booked over a short period than when your internal team devotes time to qualifying leads first and then starts cold calling each contact.