Improving Your Telemarketing Appointments

3 Tips for Improving Telemarketing Appointment Setting

B2B appointment setting efforts are often associated with the point of the campaign where you are ready to convert a lead into a hot prospect. For that matter, appointment-making skills are often required at the later stages of the business to business telemarketing funnel. Every telemarketer must be aware of some provisions that are essential for making any appointment-setting call a success.

Identify the Decision Maker

Before closing for the appointment, it is important to identify the person on the other end of the call. It is imperative to ensure that your appointment / call / online demo etc is delivered to the decision-maker. If you don’t get past the gatekeeper at this stage then all the efforts are essentially wasted. Simply ask questions such as:

“What is your job title?”
“Are you the decision maker?”
“Who is involved in the decision making process”

Keep it Simple

An appointment-making presentation full of complex sentences and technical jargon might impress a few, but it’s not the approach you should take when persuading leads to make an appointment. Leave the jargon and keep your conversation focused with easy to digest information and relevant lines of questioning.

Also, make sure that this call isn’t interpreted as an interrogation session. The call should be more of a casual one-on-one conversation instead of a Q&A session, utilising excellent telemarketing skills to secure the appointment in a non-salesy way.

Hard Sell = No Sale

Time has proven that the hard sell is the least effective of all telemarketing tactics, especially within business to business telemarketing. And the same goes for its use in any appointment-making marketing presentation. It’s really simple to understand that you can’t coerce someone to offer you their time and attention, the tips below will ensure that you close the call and book the appointment.

Don’t make your staple sales pitch part of your conversation when it does not matter. Keep it light, ask questions, tailor your pitch accordingly. And as the old adage goes: “once you get buying signals, stop selling”…
It becomes second nature for telemarketers to tirelessly talk about the given product and service. However, in a good appointment-making telephone call, the customer talks more about their pain points and you talk less. This shows that they are interested in the business.
Any good appointment-making interaction can easily go off-topic. So, it is a good practice to summarize what’s there in it for the prospect in a line or two. At the end of the day, any prospect will only agree to give you time if they realise that there is some value for them.

It’s a Learning Process

Take note of what works and what does not work when you are doing you B2B appointment setting calls to learn from them. All the unsuccessful attempts can give you a lot of learning that can help you (and in turn your colleagues) to improve your next appointment-making calls and also therefore the overall telemarketing campaign.