Appointment Set « Launch Pad Solutions Blog

How to Set Appointments

Friday, June 15th, 2012

Figuring out how to set appointments is one of the key factors that can lead to a sales person’s success. Here are eight areas to focus to improve appointment setting.

1. Identify your core value

When prospecting and trying to set appointments, you only have a couple of minutes to work with to get a prospect’s attention. As a result, you must be as efficient and attention grabbing as possible and focusing on the value that you have to offer can help with this.

2. Identify your ideal prospect

To improve how to set appointments, we must know what prospects we should spend our valuable time talking to and which ones we need to avoid and walk away from.

3. Write some soft qualifying questions

In order to make sure we are dealing with ideal prospects, need to be sure to ask some qualifying questions to identify that it makes sense to continue talking. Write out three to five questions that you could ask prospects to make sure it makes sense to meet with them when calling them to set appointments.

4. Identify some pain points

Key to getting appointments set is identifying pain that the prospect is experiencing. If there is not pain, there is no reason for the prospect to meet with you.

5. Write some building interest points

At some point, we must build a little interest on the prospect’s side. In order to help with this during the tight window that we have to work with during a cold call, we can develop a list of silver bullet points that we can share with the prospect to build interest. This could be points on what we do, how we differ form the competition, threats from not purchasing from us, etc.

6. Identify some name drops

We will need to develop some sort of credibility for when trying to improve how to set appointments. One way to quickly do this is to name drop other businesses that we have worked with.

7. Write a script

Once you have gone through all of the previously described steps, you can take all of those points and put it on the same piece of paper and you have something that can be used as a cold call script or call outline.

8. Pick up the phone

The only thing left to do at this point is pick up the phone and make it happen.

Launch Pad Solutions provides sales coaching helping sales pros to figure out how to set appointments.

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Tags: Appointment Set, Being more organized, improving quota attainment, Prospecting, sales tips
Posted in Cold Calling, Lead Generation, Sales Coaching, Sales Training | No Comments »

Four Keys to Getting an Appointment Set

Saturday, April 28th, 2012

Getting an appointment set is likely sometimes the main goal when making cold calls. While this can often seem like a challenging task to complete, there are some simple things that can be done to improve success with appointment making.

1. Focus on the Right Goal

Focus on the right goal while cold calling prospects. It can be natural to fall into the trap of trying to sell your products and services while on a cold call. Even though your ultimate goal is to sell our products, this actually might not be the best goal for us to work on during a cold call as a cold call should only last between two to five minutes.

With that being the case, we can benefit from focusing on a goal that fits well with that amount of time. Since we cannot completely and effectively sell our products during a cold call, a good goal to focus on is one of getting the prospect interested in and committed to a conversation. In other words, a good goal to stay focused on is getting the appointment set.

2. Build Rapport

To help with scheduling appointments, we can try to build rapport with prospects. This is important due to the fact that people buy from people they like. In addition, prospects are more likely to agree to taking an appointment with someone that they have a decent level of rapport with.

Although, a cold call does not present at tremendous amount of time to build rapport, but there is enough time to use a few tactics to start to establish rapport. By doing some things like respecting the prospects time, showing that we understand the prospect, listening, disqualifying, and qualifying, we can take some minor steps toward building rapport.

3. Qualify the Prospect

By qualifying prospects during cold calls, you will actually create much better conversations with prospects as you will be asking questions and making prospects more interested and engaged in what you are calling about. Not only will this lead to a better cold call by creating a better conversation, it will also decrease the prospect’s guard since you are showing interest in making sure they fit before trying to sell to them and all of this can help to with making appointments.

4. Build Interest

Before we try to get the appointment set, we need to build interest. It is similar to trying to reel in a fish. When a fish has a hook in its mouth, we need to get it to bite down before we can try to reel in. With scheduling appointments, we need to get the prospect to bite down when we try to get commitment to move forward.

Launch Pad Solutions provides sales coaching helping sales pros to get the appointment set.