Telemarketing Software Featured Article

When it comes to business-to-business selling, the rules are quite different from those governing selling to consumers. In the process that turns cold lists into warm contacts into hot leads, setting up an appointment with a prospect is often the turning point. For this reason, appointment setting needs to be managed like the critical process that it is.

Business2Community’s Belinda Summers has a list of tips to offer b-to-b marketers when it comes to appointment setting. While most of the tips are psychological – projecting confidence and attentiveness and acting natural – there is certainly more to mastering this important aspect of selling than acting like a comfortable pro. 

One of Summers’ most important tips, being certain, involves ensuring that sales professionals have the right information at their fingertips.

“To be an effective appointment setter, and to create some credibility with your sales leads prospects, you need to be sure that what you offer is what they want,” she writes. “You cannot waste your time and effort correcting mistakes.”

Mistakes, of course, can happen when appointment setting is left to an imperfect, manual and cobbled-together human process rather than managed in the context of the overall telemarketing campaign. For this reason, many successful sales organizations find that telemarketing solutions that feature an appointment setting option produce the best results. VanillaSoft is one of these solutions: the company offers an Appointment-Setting Module built into its flagship telemarketing software that was designed specifically to make setting appointments for managers, sales team members or external sales people more efficient.

By building this feature into its telemarketing software, VanillaSoft can help clients create a more dynamic sales environment. Classified as a “new result action,” the feature can be used to schedule appointments for both VanillaSoft users as well as external agents, which broadens the feature’s applications. The appointment parameters are fully customizable, letting users choose when appointments can be scheduled, who can set appointments and how appointment notifications in e-mail form, either plain text or customized, should be distributed, and when. Managers can even specify a maximum number of appointments per day that can be set for a salesperson.