5 Questions to Ask: Choosing the Best B2B Appointment Setting Partner

Choosing to outsource B2B appointment setting is a tough decision; choosing the best partner for your business is even tougher. 

Too many vendors use cookie-cutter approaches and spammy practices. Asking the right type of questions uncovers red flags before partnering with the wrong one. 

There are five critical questions you must ask as you’re evaluating different vendors:

Question 1) Who isn’t a good fit for a partnership with your company

When you’re evaluating potential partners, it’s important to get into their mindset and understand the types of companies they can and can’t help. There are a lot of vendors that say they can work with everybody in every industry, but only some are truly a good fit for your business.

It’s important to ask who they can’t help to see if they really are a fit for your industry and your core decision-makers. Your partner’s ability to understand your target persona directly impacts their ability to close meetings with your decision-makers. You don’t want them trying to fit a square peg into a round hole on your dime.

Tip: Verify their experience through case studies.

You want to push them on the details to see if they can really back up what they’re saying.

Before having conversations with potential partners, take a look at their website to find certain case studies that fit your industry and organization. Then, dig into those case studies by asking what their methodology was and why they were successful.

Decision-makers are equally important as the industry: Are they good at calling into, prospecting into, and generating appointments and leads for your decision-makers?

Sales is a one-to-one experience; it takes experience to master cold calling within a certain industry, and it is that conversation that is going to make or break the program.

Question 2) Ask how they are going to represent your brand

When outsourcing your appointment setting function, your partner represents your brand and makes phone calls on your behalf. This arrangement requires a lot of trust because your brand is the biggest asset you have. 

Whatever partner you choose, they will be making first impressions for your brand. If a program isn’t structured well with the right type of SDRs representing you, you can tarnish your reputation, which costs you business.

Choose an outsourcing partner you trust to function as an extension of you, your team, and your brand.

Tip: Ask about their SDR training methodology.

Your partner has to create a training program for the SDRs staffing your program. A strong training program will prepare your outsourced sales team to answer prospects’ questions and introduce your brand the right way. 

Some firms do an hour or two of training, then send the callers live. This rushed process creates an uphill climb for your SDRs to be successful. It’s important to have an ongoing training methodology. 

You should seek clarification about your appointment setting partner’s strategy for training their SDRs on your program:

• Which approach are they going to take?

• Do they train their SDRs by only looking at your website?

• Are they going to talk about your product/service within a couple of hours?

• Do they have a methodology in which they build an ongoing SDR training program?

Question 3) Ask what you can expect from their appointments

No two programs are the same. The number of appointments you can expect depends on your target prospects and how your value prop resonates with them. 

You can generate a whole bunch of appointments with prospects that don’t close or generate a few appointments with prospects that close big deals, and you want your partner to think that way.

Don’t rely on a guaranteed appointment volume. A reliable partner has a methodology for giving you some ranges of expectations between high and low.

Tip: When they think their responsibility ends matter.

Not every appointment is going to stick, even if it’s well-qualified. You need a partner that gets the missed appointments back on the board for you since you don’t want your salespeople taking up all their time rescheduling.

Just because somebody missed an appointment doesn’t mean they weren’t qualified. You can close a number of huge deals with rescheduled appointments.

If they have no methodology for checking whether an appointment showed up or not, it reveals their mindset. An appointment setting partner’s responsibility doesn’t end when they book an appointment for you; it ends when you’re having a great demo of that appointment they booked.

Question 4) Ask if you can meet with the SDRs calling on your campaign

Sales and prospecting are about an SDR having a great conversation with a prospect. You need to talk to the SDRs on your program and feel comfortable with them. 

If you flip it around, meeting with the SDRs also allows them to get a sense of who they’re representing and booking appointments for, and they learn a lot from these conversations.

Some appointment setting partners don’t let you meet with the SDRs calling on your program since they have a round-robin approach where multiple SDRs are cold calling and prospecting depending on the day. It is not an effective way to do proactive outreach because when SDRs switch to another client every week, they work on different:

• Demand Generation Playbook,

• sales goals,

• industry,

• decision-makers,

• and lingo.

Tip: Request a role-play.

Meeting with the SDRs on your program is necessary. You need to hear how they represent your brand, how they sound, how they relate to the prospect, and if they ask the right types of questions.

It is important to hear them in action, and it is also a great training opportunity for the SDRs. Speaking directly with the client allows them to ask questions or learn the lingo in detail. 

Role-playing is not for asking the toughest technical questions that your account executives, who spent years and years with your company, would know. It’s about feeling comfortable with how the SDRs are engaging in their tone and voice while representing your brand.

Question 5) Ask where their SDRs get their data

Without a good targeted list of the right types of accounts and prospects, it’s hard for your program to succeed. There are three ways your SDRs can get their data: 

• Is the provider asking the SDRs to do research? 

You want to maximize the amount of time the SDRs are cold calling and prospecting instead of looking through all the different databases to get the perfect list because it just slows them down and it’s not what their best uses are. SDRs aren’t researchers. 

• Are you going to provide a prospect list from a third vendor? OR Are you going to give them your own prospect list?

If you provide a list or get a third party to provide it instead of your partner, you could have the partner say, “We had a terrible list, and that’s why we’re not generating results.” You need full accountability with them to avoid these types of pleas.

• Does the appointment setting provider have a prospect list?

It is the most profitable option when outsourcing your appointment setting, but be aware of the data quality, which is one of the most challenging parts of building a successful program. If they’re calling numbers that don’t exist anymore, that’s a waste of time and money.

Tip: Be aware of zero-data campaigns.

Make sure that everything is under one roof: outsourcing an SDR team from a partner and providing a prospect list from another can ruin the success of your program.

Partner with a vendor that has an inhouse data team so that your SDRs have the data and prospect list at hand from the beginning. They can request some contacts when they uncover another prospect they need to reach out to, but they aren’t the ones who should do research.