Setting appointments can be a key part of a salesperson’s job. While this can sometimes seem challenging, there are some small steps that can make it easier, and we outlined those in this recent sales training webinar.
Step 1 – Focus on the Right Goal
The first step in this process is to focus on the right goal.
Your ultimate goal is to close the sale, sell the product, and get a new client. But your immediate goal is to advance the prospect to the next stage of the sales process.
We can sometimes get too hung up constantly on the ultimate goal, and you will improve your effectiveness in this area by staying laser-focused on your immediate goal of scheduling the appointment.
Step 2 – Confirm Availability
As you open the call, check if the prospect is available. We know they are busy, so we are not trying to determine if they are busy. We just want to see if they can stop what they are doing for a couple of minutes.
Going through this step will help you build rapport and buy you two to five minutes of time to work with.
Step 3 – Elevator Pitch
The next step in setting appointments is to share an elevator pitch, which is one or two sentences that communicate how you help your clients.
Step 4 – Soft Disqualify
After you share your elevator pitch, we want you to perform a soft takeaway. Here are some examples of what you can say here:
“I am not sure if we are a good fit for you.”
“I am not sure if you all need what we provide.”
“I am not sure you are the right person to speak with.”
This will help you decrease the prospect’s guard and establish the call.
Step 5 – Pre-Qualify
I have a couple of questions about the central piece and the purpose of your call. Not only will this help to make the call more conversational, but it will also help you extract valuable information that will enable you to pre-qualify the prospect to determine if it makes sense to keep talking.
Here is a step-by-step process that you can use to build an optimum list of questions:
- Identify the product you ultimately want to sell
- Identify the benefits it offers the buyer
- Identify the pain point that the benefit fixes
- Compose one or two questions for each pain point
Step 6 – Share Common Problems
If you ask your questions and don’t seem to uncover a need that the prospect has that you can help with, you can try to be a little more direct and share some examples of problems you help resolve, minimize, or avoid.
Step 7 – Share Brief Company and Product Info (Pre-Close Step)
At this point in this process of setting appointments, you are getting to the end of the phone call, and this is a good time to share some information about yourself. You want to share a few points and share enough so that you create the level of interest to a point where the prospect agrees to the appointment.
Step 8 – Close
The last step in this process for setting appointments is to close and to do that by simply asking for a meeting.