When it comes down to it with appointment making services, this is what it's all about.
Clients come to us to make appointments for their sales people. So we discuss the proposition, who they are targeting, qualification criteria, etc and then we get the the point of how much it's going to cost.
And at this point, someone (by which I mean us) has to put a stake in the ground and say how many appointments they'll get in a given unit of time.
Because, unlike other forms of marketing, as I've said many times before on this blog, appointment setting is all about results.
It's where the rubber meets the road.
And it doesn't matter whether you're paying a daily fee, a pay-per-appointment fee or a hybrid of the two (which is our preferred model, by the way) it all comes down the the magic number of how many appointments can be made in a day.
Why? Because whatever the fee model it always boils down to a cost per appointment.
OK, so how do we work it out?
When we're speaking with prospects we're interested in understanding the following five key variables which will help us understand the kind of run-rate we can deliver:
1) Who are you targeting? Different companies present different issues when it comes to appointment making. Are you targeting small or home businesses, larger SME's, mid-sector, public sector, etc. All these have a bearing on the the magic number.
2) Who's the decision maker? If it's an IT Director in mid-sector companies then we know it's going to be voicemail hell. Equally, MD's of small businesses (not one-man bands) are guarded like no other; everyone who picks up the phone thinks it's their sole job to stop anyone being put through.
3) What data are we using? Unless you have current and clean data then we always source fresh data. Poor data wastes time. Equally, we've worked with some great opt-in data from clients with direct mobiles, etc and pulled awesome results. Data is king in this game and the person with rubbish data will spin their wheels all day long.
The above three points help us understand what our likely "pitch-rate" is going to be. The pitch-rate is how many decision makers we can pitch in a day.
For example, an average pitch rate might be 20 per day. Some great appointment making gigs get over 30. Tough campaigns struggle to hit double digits.
OK, so we've established our pitch-rate, next we need to determine our strike-rate, which is how many pitches we can convert to appointments in a day. To understand that we need to know the following two things...
4) What's a qualified appointment? Are you looking for a creds pitch? An interview for a research paper? Or a nailed-down, budget-ready project with a drop-dead go-live-date? The tighter the qualification, the less appointments we'll book, simple.
5) What's the pitch? Finally, we have a variable which we can control to some degree. Every proposition can be spun differently and this is where we earn our bucks. Our job is to take your proposition and craft a pitch that opens doors. If it's a crowded space with established players we need to get your positioning right. If it's new technology we need to make it clear what pain you solve.
Depending on your unique proposition and competitiveness of the market we may advise softening the pitch or clipping the qualification criteria to hit a sensible strike rate. If it's a booming market and your focus is driving revenue this quarter then we'll go in hard and only look for the low-hanging fruit.
Eventually, we'll end up with a likely "strike-rate" or % conversion from pitches.
So, let's run the numbers...
Imagine we've been through this process and we think we can pitch your proposition to an average of 15 decision makers per day. If it's a reasonable pitch with an average qualification criteria we may convert 10% of those pitched.
So, 15 x 10% = 1.5 appointments per day.
That's the basic maths. But we usually also factor in ramp-up time; it's rare that we hit the road at full-speed. In the above scenario we may work on getting up to a run-rate of 1.5 appointments per day after a month or so.
Like all things to do with marketing, this is more of an art than a science.
Our approach to appointment making is to track the numbers and make sure we can deliver what we promised.
Sometimes, this approach means that we don't win the gig.
However, unlike other appointment making firms that promise the earth just to put bums on seats, we prefer to run the numbers and set realistic expectations that we know we can deliver.
Labels: appointment making, appointment making metrics, appointment setting metrics
