Business Financial Services Appointment Setting - Fill Your Sales Pipeline
Business financial services appointment setting is a means for a manager/advisor to increase business development, through more qualified prospects, closings, and sales. Specifically, outsourcing appointment setting allows a financial advisor to quickly pre-qualify prospective customers, shortens the sales cycle, increases productivity, revenue, and profitability. Whether the sales appointment is a telephone call or face-to-face meeting, outsourcing business financial services appointment setting speeds up the process of finding and converting prospects into customers.
So, let’s discuss more what it is, the benefits, and related factors you should consider before moving forward with outsourcing appointment setting for your financial business.
Business Financial Services Appointment Setting Overview
Appointment setting is part of the sales development process of a financial company. That is to say, it is the front-end of the sales cycle: identifying, connecting with, and qualifying leads. Basically, this involves cold calling prospects and following up with top-of-funnel leads to scheduling sales appointments for a financial expert who will deliver a sales presentation.
The purpose of the appointment setting is to delegate the prospecting of sales leads, so the financial expert spends time only on pre-qualified sales opportunities.
Appointment setting is crucial for any financial company since sales leads are a key element of its success. Because the sales cycle begins by finding suspects that becoming prospects, which then become qualified sales leads. Consequently, the sales appointment serves as a basic step of converting pre-qualified prospects into customers.
Challenge Of Business Development
Appointment setting is considered to be one of the most difficult parts of business development and is a major challenge to a financial company’s growth. That is to say, this is the most typical barrier in growing a company since new sales won’t be possible without first directly speaking to a prospect. Consequently, many companies outsource business financial services appointment setting to solve this challenge.
Why Should Your Financial Company Consider This?
Whether you are a financial manager or a single professional advisor, your goal should be on closing sales and not making cold calls. Specifically, this is the job of an appointment setter. Consequently, if you spend more time on appointment setting rather than selling, YOU ARE NOT SELLING.
Once you acknowledge the above, the advantages of business financial services appointment setting become clear.
Business Financial Services Appointment Setting Benefits
As mentioned, outsourcing business financial services appointment setting offers a variety of benefits to your company. Accordingly, based WHY you choose to outsource will determine which benefits are most relevant and important to you.
1 – Outsourcing Business Appointment Setting Improves The Sales Cycle
As a manager or advisor, if you are setting your own appointments you could be spending more than 50% of your time generating leads and scheduling meetings with potential clients. Instead, by outsourcing the appointment setting, you can double your time spent in face-to-face (or conference call) meetings and increase the number of client closings. Additionally, when an outsourcing provider is generating appointments with pre-qualified sales prospects interested in your portfolio of financial services, your job will be easier, you will be more motivated and you will close more sales.
Appointment setting requires research, searching business listings, lots of cold calling, dealing with gatekeepers, which takes time and results in a high level of rejection and stress. As a result, with a limited number of hours in the day, that means you are not focusing on closing the high-opportunity sales, identifying the right decision-maker, or getting referrals.
Business financial services range from commercial loans, merchant cash advance, accounting, payroll. insurance, investment planning, and more. These business services are a “people business” and you need to have a sales team that knows how to handle the process from prospecting to signing the contract.
It is better to save time by outsourcing business financial services appointment setting to a provider with personnel trained and experienced to follow the sales process. Consequently, this makes better use of your valuable time and speeds up the sales cycle.
2 – Outsourcing Business Appointment Setting Fills The Sales Pipeline
Your sales pipeline starts with prospects that need to be found, then qualified, and then converted to leads/appointments. So how do you consistently do that?
When you focus on appointment setting, you are not closing deals. When you are closing deals, you are not focusing on appointment setting. All in all, it is either feast or famine.
Both sales activities need to be done on a balanced, consistent basis. Also, there are different skill sets required for each type of sales activity. Consequently, as a financial manager or advisor, you probably use your limited hours in a day focusing on closing immediate deals, working closest to the dollar. Whereas, using the business financial services appointment setting keeps the sales pipeline filled with leads. So this lets you keep focused on sales prospects most likely to convert to clients and produce revenue.
3 – Outsourcing Business Appointment Setting Reflects A Different Skill Set
Not all salespeople are the same. While some are great on the telephone, others love meeting prospects face to face, and some even enjoy the challenge of cold calling. So, if you are not good at cold calling prospects then you simply SHOULDN’T do it. Because cold calling does not leverage your high-value skills.
Appointment setting means getting prospect lists, repetitive dialing, gatekeepers, voice mail, and rejection. Generally, most financial managers and advisors really don’t like doing these tasks. Instead, they simply want to negotiate with the decision maker and close the deal.
Outsourcing business financial services appointment setting helps get the best results instead of an in-house solution (you or your team). Because an outsourcing provider employs appointment setters who do this daily and excel at doing this.
Appointment setters have the training, experience, and mindset to consistently produce results, unlike most sales teams. Accordingly, they will qualify the decision maker, provide enough basic information to gain interest, and then suggest an appointment with the financial expert to discuss further. Then, you or your sales team takes over to close the deal.
4 – Outsourcing Business Appointment Setting Is Flexible And Affordable
Financial services appointment setting is affordable for a financial advisor with limited experience and marketing resources. Because appointment setting activities may start as a small pilot-project, this requires only a small investment.
Outsourcing appointment setting services take less time and effort than setting up an in-house team. Particularly when you consider recruitment, training, facilities, and technology purchases. Consequently, fast start-up and review help you determine whether business financial services appointment setting is affordable and produce the desired results.
You may find the appointment setting outsourcing provider will offer a performance-based fee structure after completing an initial pilot project. For example, your fee may be per sales appointment lead or live telephone transfer.
A business financial services appointment setting provider can tailor its services according to the demands of your company’s budget. Specifically, let’s say you want to start with a small number of appointments and gauge the results first. Then, you can have the service provider increase the volume based on your sales team’s capacity.
DISCLOSURE: Nexus Teleservices is a Nearshore Outsourcing Financial Services Appointment Setting business provider.
5 – Outsourcing Business Appointment Setting Provides Measurable Results
Business financial services appointment setting provides measurable business results. Particularly both qualitative and quantitative results are used since outsourcing appointment setting produces highly measurable results.
Using your outsourcing provider’s data, plus your own, you can fine-tune to get the highest ROI. However, don’t be surprised if you don’t have similar in-house data for comparison.
Here are some basic appointment setting quantitative goal metrics:
- Calls/Agent Hour
- Contacts/Agent Hour
- Qualified Appointments/Agent Hour
- Cost/Qualified Appointment
- New Conversions/Qualified Appointment
- Cost/New Conversion
Business Financial Services Appointment Setting Conclusion
Business financial services appointment setting speeds the sales cycle, keeps the pipeline full, is flexible, affordable, and offers measurable results. In brief, b.
Please call us at (888) 339-6699 to discuss how our call center financial services appointment setting will serve your business needs or Contact Us.
The most valuable lesson learned for me from this article is to find a good solution to use your time as best as possible. This will help you to focus on what you do best as a business owner and that is to close DEALS!