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Invest In Appointment Setting

Mar 17, 2014 | Appointment Setting

Invest in Appointment Setting

This article will let VSA use our years of experience in appointment setting to help your organization with its own sales and marketing programs, using the telephone!

Benefits of Telephone Prospecting Program Increase Over Time
When we first start a cold calling program, we spend an inordinate amount of time in the first 3 weeks managing the program, making sure the talking points are on target, the list works, the callers can ask questions and feel comfortable, and that the right people are assigned to the program.  So, the first week’s results are not remotely indicative of the results that will occur in the fifth week, the 10th week, or well into the future.  To assess a program early on based on incomplete data would completely undervalue the personal and financial investment you’re making upfront – and potentially eliminate a valuable component of your business growth.

It’s true: the first 10, 20 or even 50 hours of calling are not indicative of the results you’ll see from the same period in the future, as the fruits of the early planning become obvious.

Would you go back to your old accounting system after 4 weeks with the new one?  If you moved to the cloud from your on premise server, would you purchase a new server because you didn’t see the full results within 2 months?  Probably not.  You would know that learning to optimize your new tools takes time, and results will become evident as you endure.

Establish Target Goals and Work to Achieve Them
Make sure you know what your end goal is, and manage towards achieving that goal.  If you purchased a new phone system, you surely know how you want it to perform and you make sure any hiccups in the technology are addressed early on.

If you change payroll companies, you want to be sure that your new firm delivers service at least as good as and most probably better than your prior firm.  You certainly don’t just pay the bills and “wait and see.”  The same is true with appointment setting.

While the early results are lower than the results you’ll achieve in the long run, you will want to set some targets upfront, and increase them slightly over time.  You’ll want to measure your ability to reach decision makers, the kind of objections you’re getting and how successful you are in overcoming them, etc.

It’s not okay just to implement a program and “wait and see.”  A cold calling program should produce a significant ROI over time.  Metrics for every company differ, but each company needs to establish metrics as a tool to measure their sales and marketing plan.

Do not Dabble; Make a Real Commitment
Think of telephone prospecting like any other activity in your company.  How long would it take for you to assess the success of a new employee?  Of a new organization structure or a new accounting system?  When you take on a new employee or change the structure of your organization, you are not just “trying it out for grins,” you have probably made very deliberate decisions.  You will probably invest your personal time and energy at the early stages to really work out the kinks in any new initiative to ensure optimal effectiveness.

Your assessment period will probably require one to six months at least.  That’s the time frame before which you’ll begin seeing results that you can feel or quantify.  The same is true when a telemarketing company begins a calling program.

What VSA has learned over time and can impart to you can be summarized in one sentence:  Make cold calling a business decision you can commit to long term, just like any other investment.  Do not dabble and hope for the best.  Manage it, measure it, and stick to it.  The worst thing you can do is pull the plug too soon, and the best thing you can do is manage the program to see its full potential.