Appointment setting is so critical to an effective sales process. It ensures that you are qualifying leads before you attempt to sell to them and acts as an effective relationship-building tool with your customer base.
Although appointment setting is vital to meeting your sales goals, it can be challenging to do well, time-consuming for your team, and difficult to scale. For these reasons, outsourcing this task to a B2B appointment setting services provider is worth considering.
What are pros and cons of appointment setting outsourcing? Learn why they may benefit your business, explore a few possible pitfalls you need to be aware of, and discover how to partner with the right contact center to maximize your results.
How Outsourcing Appointment Setting Can Benefit Your Business
Why is appointment setting being outsourced? It’s simple: From productivity to profits, having the right contact center team on your side can take your sales to a new level. If you’re still deciding whether outsourced appointment setting is the right move, here are four specific ways it can transform your business and team.
Cost Control
Hiring a sales team can be expensive in terms of both money and time. Research indicates that the hiring and training process for a single sales rep can cost over $60,000. And with positions taking an average of six months to fill, going without a sales employee can cost you even more in lost sales.
In this way, outsourcing appointment setting can help you save a lot of money. Because the contact center hires and trains agents, you’ll get access to an experienced team at a fraction of the cost of building your own.
A lower appointment setting services cost is especially significant when you’re ready to scale, as you can add as many agents to your team as you need without spending tens of thousands of dollars on each one.
As a bonus, you won’t have to worry about losing a top employee and going through the recruiting and onboarding process again.
Data Collection and Analysis
When you hire a B2B appointment setter, you’ll get access to robust reporting and analysis that can give you deep insights into your target audience. Your sales team can do many things with this data, including uncovering market trends and forecasting sales numbers.
Your team will also learn a lot about your customers’ needs and preferences through reports from your appointment-setting services. This will help them improve their sales tactics, ultimately closing more sales and increasing profit for your business.
Multiple Talents
What is B2B appointment setting? It’s a creative combination of customer service and sales. Appointment setters must understand their target audience’s needs, attitudes, and desires, craft an experience that aligns well with their expectations, and then sell the lead on the idea of learning more about the product.
Any salesperson you hire will likely have spent years working on their craft. While that focus is a good move for a sales career, appointment setting also takes deep customer service expertise.
When you outsource appointment setting, your team will likely have both skills, saving you the time and money it would take to train your sales team to master another role.
More Focused Sales Team
Business owners often ask this question: What are the benefits of appointment setting outsourcing? Many of them get very excited about the answers. You may not know that you can work with a contact center to augment your in-house sales team by passing off the B2B appointment setting tasks to the center’s agents.
Doing this frees up time for your team to work with more of those warm leads, answering their questions and convincing them to buy your product. This process allows each segment of your team to focus on what they do best. Working together, you can set more appointments and close more deals.
The Possible Drawbacks of Outsourced Appointment Setting
Business owners need to realize that while outsourcing your appointment setting can be highly beneficial, there are cons to making this choice.
Loss of Control
Outsourcing your lead qualification and appointment setting means you are not in complete control of hiring decisions. Some business owners worry that being unable to handpick their team from their own pool of qualified candidates means they will be subjected to working with an inexperienced team.
While this is not the case with the best appointment-setting services, business owners should be aware of the possibility.
Reliance on Third Party
There’s no getting around the fact that outsourcing your appointment setting means that you are relying on a third party for performance and data collection. As a business owner, you may have concerns about whether the outsourced team will be as committed to your stated goals and the expected outcome as an in-house team would be.
May Not Align with Values or Goals
Because you haven’t participated in the hiring process, you may be unsure whether the outsourced team will keep your company’s values or goals in mind when interacting with customers. Unfortunately, this has the potential to cause issues as time progresses.
For example, if the agents are unaware of your service philosophy and best practices, it may hinder your ability to provide a consistent experience for your clients. This, in turn, can negatively impact your sales goals or brand sentiment. Fortunately, you can fix this issue by following best practices and hiring an experienced contact center.
A Few Tips for Choosing an Outsourcing Company
While it’s important to know the pros and cons of appointment setting services, you should understand that each of these drawbacks can be corrected by taking the time to evaluate your choices and ensuring you select a highly qualified outsourcing company to work alongside your team.
If you’re wondering what criteria you should be using to evaluate your outsourcing choices, here are just a few tips for finding a contact center that aligns with your needs, values, and goals:
- Never choose an outsourcing company solely based on price, as ultracheap pricing can signal a lack of care in hiring practices
- Ask how the contact center will choose agents for your account and whether those agents have industry-specific B2B sales experience at the enterprise level
- Have an in-depth conversation about your specific values and goals and how the contact center will ensure those goals are met
- Inquire about the contact center’s reporting process and how often you will be able to analyze data against your selected key performance indicators
- Visit the outsourcing company’s website to look for testimonials from businesses in your niche who have had stellar results with its services
Considering these critical aspects before hiring a contact center team will help you ensure the best possible return on your outsourcing investment.
Outsourced Appointment Setting Can Be the Key to Success
Outsourcing your appointment setting is crucial to increasing conversions and boosting your bottom line — but only when it’s done right. A good contact center team with well-trained agents can help you control costs and increase productivity while allowing your business unlimited room to scale.
Since an outsourced team can be worth its weight in gold, take the time to evaluate your choices properly, choose the company that can deliver results, and reap the benefits of better sales and profits.