Top 10 Questions to Ask Before Hiring an Appointment Setting Company

A robust sales pipeline brimming with valuable high-quality prospects is the lifeblood of successful B2B companies. But how do you qualify those types of prospects? Your sales team has to get in front of them, of course.

And securing these meetings frequently requires a challenging and laborious calling campaign. That’s the reason for hiring the right appointment setting company can have a major effect on your organization’s bottom line.

If you’re seeking an appointment setting partner who can make valuable connections, identify companies you’re able to help, and schedule appointments with qualified leads, it literally pays to evaluate each company using a strict, methodical process.

To ensure you choose the correct firm, Vsynergize has assembled a list of 10 important questions to ask every company you will be considering.

Although it may seem like an obvious first question to ask, many people become so involved in the process that they often forget to ask it. 

The company you choose to conduct business with must be a trustworthy company. This is the key to dealing with any business, not just telemarketers. 

Do your research and find out if they are a member of any industry certifications such as the Customer Contact Association (CCA) or Investors in People. 

Dig deeper and search if the company has been featured in any publications in recognition for their work. To gauge an appointment setting company’s reputation, use these 3 criteria:

• How well has the company performed in the past?
• Do past and current clients recommend the clients?
• Can you identify and contact reliable references?

The appointment setting business is competitive, and effective players most often come to the table with substantial exposure to a particular industry. 

However, it isn’t always about having industry experience, it’s about having the right experience. 

At Vsynergize, our success comes from our ability to successfully deliver your value proposition in the language of your target industry. 

Our past experiences have informed our approach to business and also helped us identify verticals where we would have the greatest impact: healthcare, technology, and financial services.

Your and your future partner’s thoughts regarding the intended audience of your lead generation campaigns ought to be well aligned.

A well-fitting prospect’s lead capability rules are particular and well-developed, as well as in concurrence with your own. 

How about we review the 2 categories of qualified leads:

• Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), which are frequently distinguished by a marketing department as demonstrating a lot of enthusiasm for a business or its products.
• Sales-qualified leads (SQLs), practical prospects who have been screened by a sales team in the wake of being passed to them from a marketing team.

Tracking techniques, including segmentation, lead scoring, and list management, greatly assists in the acquisition of quality leads.

Are you simply searching for cold callers or would you prefer to take an additional account-based selling approach? The approaches and also the outcomes they drive are significantly totally different. 

While lead generation companies have a usually similar approach, their methodologies can differ considerably. When seeking your best-fit company, take into account the range of approaches and people you personally prioritize.

Services offered by lead generation companies include:

• SEO
• Social media
• Blogging
• Web page optimization
• Paid search
• Email marketing
• Outbound techniques like cold calling and pay-per-click

Some organizations go beyond and additionally offer services like creation of content like e-books, event promotion, and B2B appointment setting.

Your contact database or CRM application contains critical business intelligence that marketing and sales teams – not to mention your business – can’t live without. How can you be sure you’re partnering with a company that manages data responsibly?

One way is to look for a company that includes database management tasks within its regular campaign management routine. After all, updating contact data and collecting marketing and sales intelligence is the key to consistent appointment setting. Confirm that agents consistently update contact data for your leads.

Also read: Top 7 Reasons Why to Outsource Appointment Setting Work

Experienced appointment setting companies know they’re not a good fit for everybody. That’s why you should look for a company that’s willing, to begin with, a test campaign – so both parties can tell whether a relationship has long-term potential.

A test campaign calls on you to make a relatively small investment to get a feel for how a company works, the quality of the appointments it secures, and whether a larger campaign will generate positive ROI. At Vsynergize, we always start each new client with a test campaign as a proof-of-concept exercise.

Lead qualification criteria, time spent understanding clients’ objectives, getting to know the language of the industry – all of these factors come into play during agent preparation, and you should only hire a company whose agents are mature enough to excel at all of them.

But don’t forget what comes before the campaign preparation. The way a company chooses agents matters, too. Agents should be skilled, experienced, and motivated. Do the companies you’re considering take pride in agents’ abilities or do they gloss over questions about agent selection? 

To gauge whether a company’s agent enlisting and commitment standards line up with your requirement, ask these questions during your evaluation:

• Will the agents working my campaign be mature and skilled so that they can engage the prospect in meaningful conversation?
• How will the agent know whether a lead is qualified and to only set appointments with qualified prospects?
• Are your agents based in the same country as your customers?

Agents will make lots of calls during your campaign, and you need a way to verify the following:

• What was the day’s level of productivity?
• How is the campaign tracking?
• Agents are asking the correct questions and populating the right fields in your database
• Agents are following up on callbacks and adding notes about contacts and conversations

Reports should also provide a baseline for your future success if you continue to engage with the company. Based on the ratio of calls made to appointments set, you should have a good idea of a company’s long-term performance and potential to help you meet revenue objectives over the long term and to some degree project ROI.

Again, there are a couple of various answers that can give you some insight into how the company works and the inherent quality of the appointments set, and once again the right decision may astonish you! Companies that charge on a for each appointment basis won’t just cost over the long period, but may likewise furnish your sales team with weaker appointments. 

From my personal experience, an inundation of weak appointments can possibly create a mutiny between the sales team and the office over who gets what lead. The more secure option is a flat rate campaign that charges on an hourly basis. With an hourly campaign, the emphasis is on giving an ROI and not immersing you and your sales team with poorly qualified appointments.

This is a question you should ask yourself after considering all of the factors discussed thus far. Remember, you’re creating an Associate in Nursing investment and selecting a B2B appointment setting firm is regarding come on investment and not regarding finding the seller giving the bottom value. 

Avoid choosing a company based on price alone. Instead of asking how much it will cost to work with a particular company, a better question is, “Will the price this company charges be justified by the results it produces?”

In this market, quality matters. From the quality of the agent’s on your campaign to the quality of the appointments that you receive, numerous factors can impact your ROI.

With these queries in mind, you will hopefully be well-equipped to search out a corporation that is right for you and enter a lead generation partnership that lasts a period of time. 

Be sure to explore any other concerns you may have by taking the time to come up with your own questions; when it comes to making an informed decision, there’s really no such thing as being too inquisitive.

Still, have more questions about developing your lead generation strategy? Contact us or call us on
+1-732-481-9424. Our demand gen expert will get you on your way to understanding all of the key pieces of a quality campaign.