Sales Appointment Setting – When to Call it a Day

A successful appointment setting campaign can be a double edge sometimes. Having a lot of leads and meeting so many prospects essentially means loads of opportunities.

It also, however, means loads of work for your salespeople and your appointment setters. You don’t need to see the signs of stress to realize that there’s a point when you need to call it a day.

Everyone wishes they had more time. Even if you managed to cut your work time in half (like in this Hubspot guide), who’s to say someone higher up would want to crank it up to the next limit?

Want more bad news? There’s really nothing to stop it. That’s how a business grows. You don’t get too complacent. You find ways to do more with less so you could do more. It sounds ironic at first but sooner or later, everyone gets bitten by the expansion bug.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do everything all at once. If you’re getting a lot of leads or at least find yourself in a position that they’re too many to handle, set it aside for another time. The same goes for your marketers. When there’s still just a lot to be done in terms of outbound marketing, content creation, qualification etc, then everyone should save some strength for another day.

The next questions would be: How much work is too much? When exactly do you cut off? How do you maintain productivity?

• Step 1: Establish an average – Whether it’s an average amount of closes, appointments, blog posts, or even landing pages, it must be established. This will be a sort of foothold where going above it means possible exhaustion and going below it means decreased productivity.

• Step 2: Use average as a cutoff – When it looks like your people are at their limit, check the proximity of their results to the average you’ve established. Use that to determine the amount of work they’ll have to finish next time.

• Step 3: Plan for next week’s work – You’ve already established that there’s more work to be done. It only makes sense that you should at least start planning ahead. Ask salespeople to review their prospect details for next week’s appointments. Meet with your marketers about how they will organize their efforts.

• Step 4: Never stay too long under the average –Complacency is the result of staying too long under your established average rate of production. Although, don’t be too quick to start pointing fingers. Investigate the drops and then do what you can to fix what’s wrong.

Calling it a day isn’t the same as calling it quits. Neither should it mean you’re getting too lax about your job. Funnily enough, it can actually be pretty productive when you know how to divide your work across days.

Read more:

• Appointment Setting Tips – Plan Beyond the Prospects
• 11 Best Scheduling Software