In last week’s post, Why Appointments Cancel Part 1, we looked at why prospects and customers cancel appointments despite the time and effort you spend outbound prospecting. We saw how discouraging it is when your focused outreach efforts don’t pan out, and identified some real reasons why appointments cancel. Part 2 provides a few tips to keep prospects from backing out of appointments for more fruitful outbound sales and marketing prospecting efforts.
How to Set Qualified Appointments that Stick
- Seek out the reasons that compel current customers or prospects. Look to your customers and prospects and engage with them to truly understand their compelling reasons to buy or consider your product or service. This will serve as the basis to comprehend the most motivating reason you must uncover with future prospects who may be interested in scheduling an appointment during your outbound prospecting efforts.
- Spend time to fully comprehend your customer’s and prospect’s urgent reasons. Get comfortable with the urgent and compelling reason your customers and prospects consider buying from you. Know it inside and out. Be able to clearly articulate the benefits of your product or service, in a comfortable story-like fashion, when talking with a senior executive.
- Be able to articulate your customer’s buying reason clearly and concisely in your customer’s or prospect’s language. As you would communicate a relevant story to your friend if he or she expressed a need or problem, likewise approach a prospect or customer similarly when you uncover an important or strongly felt need.
- Engage with your prospects and ask them if they have had the same urgent situation as your customers had. When you uncover a particularly important need, discover if your customer or prospect wants to resolve it. If you can solve it then you may have a viable potential prospect.
- Be sure you and the prospect agree upon the urgent and compelling reason to set an appointment. Understand their willingness to seek resolution.
Fully addressing your customer’s strongest motivations will put you in good standing with your customer or prospect and help them keep their appointment. When you both see the urgency, your customer may feel compelled to reschedule and keep an appointment if they do have a situation in which a priority comes up and they need to change plans. This approach applies regardless of how you are engaging with prospects – whether through traditional channels or in social media environments.