Article 101

Six Tipping Points For Successful Appointment Setting: How to go from no results to 2/3 appointments per day with 50 million dollar companies within a month.

Would you invest three hours of phone time if you were able to set 2/3 appointments a day with large high-worth targeted companies? A recent coaching client achieved this result and I would like to explain how.

We started less than two weeks ago. This is the e-mail I received this past Saturday morning.

"I have been so busy going to all the appointments Karina has been booking that I don't even have time to write emails and make phone calls. Good problem to have. Scott, thank you so much for your help. I just want to say that I am so impressed as to how fast your system worked. It was like a miracle. I tried hard to set appointments for 3 months. Training, conference calls, more training and no results AT ALL. We use your system and I have Karina booking two to three appointments per day with 3 hours of work, with 50 million dollar companies and higher. Thank you again for your help. It was a blessing that I found you on the internet."
Simon Olszewski

Like many, Simon and Karina are smart (very, very smart) hard working experienced salespeople with a credible high-ticket product/service who can close a big deal when they can meet the right people at targeted companies. They beat their brains out for three months trying to set appointments WITH NO RESULTS AT ALL.

Within 5 weeks using my system they are trading 3 hours of time for 2/3 high level appointments. Here are the tipping points that generated that success. You need to focus on these areas to get the same results.

1. They had a solid handle on their best prospects.

A big obstacle for many, which they avoided, was not having a specific profile by
industry, SIC code, revenue range, employee range and geography of those who would be their best most profitable accounts. Many people cast this net far too wide and end up significantly reducing their return on investment. No such problem here.

2. They immediately setup a customized contact manager which helped them move faster, and didn't slow them down. Sorry people, but your paper systems, spreadsheets, corporate wide CRM programs are a heavy anchor slowing down the good ship appointment setting. Rather than try to cling to existing programs they spent all of $127 and spent 3 hours with me setting up and customizing Goldmine 6.5. (Goldmine, ACT or Maximizer are the most common programs that will do the job.) A one time 3 hour time investment provided them an additional hour of productivity EVERY DAY spent prospecting.

3. They adhered to proven script templates. I didn't have to listen to common drivel such as "My industry is different... my customers are different... this service is different...this area is different." What crap!! They took the dozens of appointment script and responses to resistance samples I shared with them and wrote scripts which followed the template. They did not lose efficiency and results because they insisted on straying from templates that have proven successful in all industries over the last 11 years.

4. They came up with coding and segmentation that made sense. Appointment setting is like a giant sorting process. Separate the high-worth from the low-worth, the short-term from the long-term, the worth your time from the not worth your time. You have to use simple codes to segment your suspects so that you can allocate time and resources to where it will do the most good.

5. They focused on being good at each step in the process in order. It is very helpful to identify each step of the appointment setting process and focus on getting good at each step in order. So rather than try to master 7 things at once and get frustrated, we first focused on getting good at identifying 15 new decision makers a day in about an hour, then we focused on delivering the set the appointment script well, then we focused on responding to the 7 most common forms of resistance well, then we focused on power calling techniques to increase conversations, etc.

If you just focus on setting appointments in general typically nothing is generated but frustration. Focus on being good at each step of the appointment setting process... voila!... appointments magically appear.

6. They tracked and measured. Rather than simply engage in frenzied dialing and activities they used the simple tracking forms provided to identify and focus on areas that needed improvement. Hmmm... I see we are not identifying enough decision makers on a daily basis to meet our goals, lets focus on that... I see we need more conversations, that can be fixed... I see that the "send more info" objection is killing us, let's focus on that.... It's kind of like driving a car. Start to veer to the right, steer back to the road. Veer to the left, steer back to the road. The tracking forms let you know when you are veering off the road.

The above situation is very common.

Best wishes with your sales and marketing,
Scott Channell

copyright 2005-2009 scott channell

Article 33	Tipping points for appointment setting
	by Scott Channell