Published 4 December 2018

How B2B Appointment Generation Can Make You the Best VP of Sales?

Explore the impact of effective B2B appointment generation on sales growth and career advancement. Understand the importance of generating qualified appointments for sales teams and the role it plays in achieving revenue targets. This blog discusses strategies and best practices for successful B2B appointment generation, such as targeting the right audience, personalized outreach, and leveraging marketing automation tools. It emphasizes the potential of mastering appointment generation as a pathway to career advancement, specifically to the role of Vice President of Sales.

Introduction

The b2b sales structure is complex. To sustain it, sales people have to not only focus on growing sales and maintaining customer relationships, but they also have to juggle administrative tasks, in addition to responsibilities in the wider team. Such a packed calendar can leave very little time in for any real revenue creation. To achieve sales success, your sales teams have to optimize their time by doing so, they will:

Streamline the sales processes for faster SQL leads qualification
Grow and nurture relationships with high-value clients and prospects
Have time to set and execute clear sales goals
Managers and even you the VP of sales will be more involved in team members’ sales pitching and
can improve the process through reviews, coaching, and training
Have more time to focus on data analysis for faster decision making and performance improvement

But this is not often the case as we will show below. The typical day of a salesperson can be so full of administrative tasks that get in the way of sales targets.

Why You Are Not Meeting Your Sales Targets

If your team is not meeting their sales targets, the problem most likely lies in:

An inefficient lead generation approach
Focusing on the wrong things instead of selling

Lead Generation Efforts Will Fail If:

The lead generator has the wrong style, procedure or attitude. You need people trained to do the job. People with a natural sound, the right voice, enough experience dealing with prospects, and with an understanding of lead generation procedures.
Contact lists have the wrong customer type or customer size. Are you targeting customers who are too small to afford your services or too big as to find your solutions unscalable? Are you targeting customers who don’t need your services?
Pitch delivery is wrong. In addition to presenting content in a logical manner that prospects can follow, sales pitches should be kept short and impactful.
The lead generator doesn’t know the name of the decision maker. In such a case, the secretary or office admin who will answer the call will most likely stall, resulting in a lost lead.
Phone calls get shut down at the beginning. There are two reasons why this can happen:

When the introduction is too long. After they pick up a call, leads have very little time to decide whether or not they are interested. If you take too long to get to the point, you are less likely to get your meeting setting.
Two, if the script doesn’t sound natural, it won’t make any impact.

Sales Teams Are Doing All the Wrong Things and VPs Don’t Know About It

If this is what your sales people are doing most of their day, then you will have a difficult time creating revenue for your company:

What’s worse, VPs and directors of the company are not aware of this fact, so it follows that most of them are doing nothing about it, or are taking steps to correct the wrong problems.

The Highest Priority of Sales People is to Close Leads

The sales environment is becoming more difficult for sales people, according to a survey from Hubspot research. But due to the existing rift between sales and marketing people, sales people have to prospect for leads, in addition to spending more time on administrative work like data entry.

Additionally, prospecting has gotten harder. This is bad news for any VP of sales.

The question that begs therefore is, “how can you focus on selling more and prospecting less?” The answer is ‘appointment generation’ (or appointment setting).

Appointment Generation Results in More Sales Qualified Leads

Appointment setting can be a long and rigorous process. Done correctly, and by qualified appointment services, it can be a useful medium for creating a good first impression of your company. More importantly, appointment setters convince prospects to meet you.

Any company can benefit from appointment generation, but B2B appointment setting will be especially beneficial to your company if these traits are present:

You sell complex services with long sales cycles. Multiple calls will need to be made during the sales cycle but once successful, the deal on the table is likely to be large.
A decision maker is a person at a high level, such as the owner, VP or line manager
Even after a lead is developed, many follow up calls still need to be made before deal closing.
Your traditional mode of selling products is not working and you need to take advantage of the solution-selling model to demonstrate your value to potential clients.

Filling the lead funnel should be the first step you take to grow revenue faster. The next important step is to qualify the leads. This important job should be done by your appointment setters. They should then pass sales qualified leads to your team, nurture the unqualified leads, while eliminating low-quality leads. With this approach you and your sales team will benefit in the following ways:

Spend Less to Generate a Sale

Appointment setters make an average of 30 calls in one hour and connect with 1 prospect. It takes 5-6 connects to score 1 appointment with qualified leads, within the same time frame. This number is a lot higher than what an untrained person can do, a factor that results in cost saving while giving you the opportunity to make more revenue.

More Time to Dive Into Your Sales Analytics

Analytics are important for a smooth sales pipeline but if data is mismanaged or analytics misinterpreted, this could result in an inefficient sales pipeline. Appointment setting services collect useful analytics based on the metrics you set, which you can then use to make decisions that improve your return on investment.

Deal Only With Sales Qualified Leads

You will only deal with people who are genuinely interested in buying, instead of spending countless hours going through your contact list.

Free Advertisement

If appointment setters are calling 30 prospects each hour, those represent 30 more companies that have heard about you, most of them for the first time. If the sales script is impactful and each call is made to completion, your appointment setters will end up passing a lot of information about your company to large groups of professionals who can then alert other professionals. At the end of the day, even if not all those leads qualify, you get a lot of free publicity.

Boost Sales Percentage

Successful one-on-one appointments boost your sales percentage. Once you get in the door, prospects will use your first meeting to make their decision. If you do a good job and convince them that your services will solve their problem, it will be a lot harder for them to shut you down.

Bottom Line: What Does an Effective Sales Team Look Like

To reiterate, the success of any sales team is defined by how much sales they do. A survey conducted by Towers Watson on 1500 sales managers in the US showed that successful sales managers spend 100 more hours a year generating sales. Unlike their underperforming counterparts, they also spend 39 hours less managing their teams and 61 hours on activities not related to selling. Other insights from the survey also show that successful sales managers:

Spend more time with current customers, focusing on after sales or selling new solutions.
Are 3 times more likely to devote attention equally to the team as opposed to nurturing a relationship with a few team members. This ensures lower performing members receive coaching while high performers receive reinforcement.

Sales people have a higher opinion of a manager who interacts with them on a regular basis. By consulting daily with managers on sales approaches and related challenges, teams are likely to perform better. Through appointment generation, you can create an effective sales team that has higher chances of signing up new customers because they maximize their face time with sales qualified leads.