Booking that sales appointment is everything. You have your pitch ready. You know you can make a really convincing case for your product. You know that your product can offer value to the prospect you’re talking to. But all that doesn’t matter. Unless you manage to get that sales appointment booked. So in this post, we’re going to help you figure out how to get that calendar full of appointments.

How to get appointments in sales

  1. Pitch only to your ICP
  2. Establish a clear purpose
  3. Have a powerful CTA
  4. Make the ‘next steps’ clear
  5. Plan for objections 
  6. Make scheduling easy 

Conclusion

How to get appointments in sales

A salesperson is as successful as the number of meetings in their calendar. As strong as your cold calling or cold email game is, you only get to hit your numbers if you manage to get that sales appointment booked. Sales appointments are your real opportunities to make your case, reach the decision makers if you haven’t already, and convert a conversation into a contract. 

So to answer your question of how to get meetings with prospects - here are 6 effective steps you can start taking from today. 

1. Pitch only to your ICPs

Sales is a numbers game. But completing x number of cold calls a day, or sending out x emails a week will only be vanity numbers unless you're pitching to your ICPs - your ideal customer profile. Having clarity on who your ideal prospect is (here’s a helpful checklist, btw), that should be the first step of your outbounding. Once you’ve identified that, make sure that your prospect lists are pre-qualified based on it. Don’t waste your efforts and time on contacts that aren’t likely to find value in what you sell. Once you start pitching to your ICP, you’re bound to have more success in setting appointments due to a direct fit between your product and their pain points. And once you set your appointments, you’re likely to see a great conversation rate, thanks to your pre-qualification.

2. Establish a clear purpose

For cold calls or sales emails to get appointments, you need to make sure that you establish the purpose of the call/email as quickly as you can. You don’t have much time or room for error here before you get that ‘not interested’ or you get hung up on. Before you even seek an appointment, you need to communicate why you think the prospect might find value in one. This, of course, if based on the business priorities and challenges of your prospect, but an example would be something like ‘I’m contacting you to see if you can set aside 20-30 mins to discuss how you can reduce your marketing spends or ‘....how you can slash your employee turnover ’ or ‘...how you can increase your prospecting pace”...you get the drift,

P.S….never ask for less than 20 mins for your sales appointment. That’s the basic amount of time you’ll need to share anything of value. Anything less, and you’ll be undermining yourself and your product.

3. Have a powerful CTA

You’ve spent some time understanding your prospect and establishing your purpose. That’s great. Now you have to entice them to take action. Do they want to slash turnover or pick up the pace of prospecting? Sure they do. Now you need to make it clear that YOU are how they can achieve that. And that’s where your call-to-action comes in. Having a clear call to action will help make that push between mildly interested to ‘I want to know more’, and that’s what gets you those appointments. 

So establish your purpose - i.e. Want to accelerate your prospecting pace to drive more opportunities? 


And then add a compelling CTA - Are you open to a conversation on how Outplay can help you 3X your prospecting pace?

4. Make the ‘next steps’ clear

This might sound silly, but it’s the small (but powerful) things that slip our mind. You need to clearly define next steps for anyone compelled to book a meeting. Here’s what we mean. We got a powerful CTA - Are you open to a conversation on how Outplay can help you 3X your prospecting pace? Your prospect is intrigued. They want to explore. But how exactly do they do that? Your CTA has established the action - a meeting. You need to be clear about how they can schedule this meeting. It can be anything like -

  • When would be a good time this week? Let me know and I’d be happy to share a meeting invite. 
  • I’ve included my calendar here. Feel free to use this link and block any open slot that looks good to you.

5. Plan for objections

You’d be a very lucky bug if you’ve managed to get your prospect to book an appointment on the first contact. But let’s get real, you’ll have to engage them a few times before they’re ready for the next steps. And during this time, you’re bound to encounter a bunch of objections. You’ll need to plan and script for them. Any of these sound familiar? 

  • We don’t have the budget this quarter
  • I’m not the right person to take decisions on this
  • We already have a solution that working for us
  • We’re not interested at this time

List down all possible objections beforehand, have scripts prepared on how to deal with them. Planning for objections is the way to overcome them and take your conversation to the next stage, and eventually get that sales appointment.

6. Make scheduling easy

You need to make it easy for the prospect to act on their intent to book a sales appointment. And the best way to do that is by making appointment scheduling easy. Avoid all points of friction or back and forths. They’ll just make your prospect feel like the effort isn’t worth it. And you can’t blame them. We’re all busy people. Use a tool like Outplay’s meeting scheduler to insert your calendar link into your email and allow the prospect to choose from the open slots in just a click. And once they do that, you’ll have your calendar updated automatically as well, so you don’t miss anything. 

Conclusion 

Whatever steps you take to get those appointments booked (and you need to take them all), you need to build a powerful outreach machine to help you reach more prospects, faster. There are some really powerful tools in the market that’ll help you do that. Like Outplay. Outplay helps you prospect, engage across channels and seamlessly schedule meetings - all from a single platform. From powerful sales automations to AI-powered conversational intelligence, Outplay helps make sales easy for your team. Fill your calendars with meetings and start closing more deals with Outplay. Try it for free.