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Updated August 22, 2022You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
Once you have an appointment time and contact information, you need to send the relevant details for the meeting. For very early-stage customer conversations (like your first dozen customers), I’m a fan of going to visit the individual in person. As discussed in Early Prospecting, this is why initially targeting accounts in your own geography is helpful, even if the price point of your solution means that your scaled go-to-market will likely be via inside sales. If an in-person meeting is not tenable, you’ll need a means of digital presentation. Zoom and join.me are good for this, as we’ll discuss more later.
Whether the meeting will be digital or in person, all of the relevant coordinates need to be included in the meeting invite you send to the prospect. You absolutely must send a calendar meeting invite. You cannot rely on the prospect to put the relevant details on his calendar, and this is a convenient way to both put the meeting on his calendar and deliver the pertinent meeting details. Put the location details (whether online or offline) in the location section of the meeting invite, in addition to the description section (yes, repeat them)—something like, “Online meeting via join.me. Use this link to join: […]” Be sure to put a brief agenda in the description section, after the duplicate location coordinates. Lastly, make sure to include a rich title description that reminds both the prospect and you of the goal of the meeting, like, “Twitter and TalentBin Online Demo” or, “HIRABL and Robert Half In-Person Demo.”
Finally, make sure to invite all the relevant participants who were surfaced in your call.
Source: TalentBin
After sending the relevant meeting invite to the prospect, make sure to block 15–30 minutes on your own calendar both immediately before and after the appointment to ensure you have proper time to prepare and to follow up. If you don’t, there’s a risk that those slots may get calendared over, and you’ll find yourself double-booked when you should be executing activities in support of your meeting. We’ll discuss preparation activities in more depth later, but you want to make sure that you have the time to treat every appointment with the seriousness it deserves. You would be amazed by the lack of preparation some reps exhibit in approaching meetings that not only represent tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars of potential revenue but, moreover, are the culmination of hours of appointment-setting activities. At TalentBin, we used to call demos “five-thousand-dollar bills,” because with our average contract value and win rate, each demo represented ~$5K. This joking terminology helped focus the appropriate amount of attention on the importance of preparation, execution, and follow-up. Lastly, if you’re going to be traveling to the meeting, make sure you block appropriate travel time so you get there with plenty of time to spare.
Part of appointment setting is making sure that people actually show up to the meeting. This is more of an issue with digital meetings, because the individual needs to click on your join.me or Zoom link. And while attendance is somewhat helped by traveling to the prospect, the worst-case scenario can still happen if the prospect is double-booked. You wasted travel time and weren’t able to complete the appointment. The solution to both of these outcomes is to sufficiently remind the prospect with a good amount of time. You can do this in the meeting invite by setting reminders; I like 15 minutes ahead of the meeting. Setting one further out than that can be dangerous, because calendar-sent reminders are typically read by prospects as, “This is happening right now”; if you set a reminder too early, or set multiple reminders, you can end up with prospects showing up multiple hours early—and unhappy about it. So using calendar-based notifications as anything other than immediate reminders can be a crapshoot. A better approach is email-based reminders. Use something like Yesware or Boomerang’s Send Later functionality to stage a reminder email to send early in the morning of the meeting in question. You just have to make sure that if the meeting ends up being moved, you go into your Scheduled Emails and modify the date for the staged email.
Aside from ensuring that prospects show up, reminder emails are also another opportunity to set expectations, especially for a first call.
example“Hey, Sarah. Looking forward to speaking with you and going over TalentBin. I understand that when we reached out to you to schedule this call, you had expressed specific interest in learning more about boosting candidate response rates and managing existing candidates. I will cover these in depth with you.”
This not only provides guidance on what’s going to be covered (so the prospect doesn’t go rogue on you), but also is an opportunity to tease the content.
It’s a rare situation where your first email or first call results in a prospect getting back to you and agreeing to an appointment. Instead, you’ll need to implement a series of outreach actions targeting your prospects, typically alternating between emails, calls, and voice mails. In sales, this interleaving of outreach actions over time is known as a cadence.
You can of course implement this yourself via your lightweight Google Sheet CRM or in a more formal fashion through an actual CRM. Or, if you want to get really crazy, there is a set of solutions that are designed specifically to orchestrate this outreach cadence—two primary players being Outreach and SalesLoft. Both have pricing that accommodates an individual inexpensively and can help you be much more efficient in your appointment-setting workflow.
Regardless of whether you’re doing it yourself or using an orchestration system, typically you want to alternate emailing and calling. That might be an initial email and call on day one, followed by a call on day two, and then maybe a call and a voicemail on day three. From there, you might skip a day, and then email on day five, followed by an “I’m breaking up with you” email on day seven. By no means is this a cut-and-dried approach—you could decide to do calls with follow-up emails every other day, or some other permutation, if it works for you. To some extent, this will be related to how much content you have to share. If you have a lot of great things to say about your solution, and you have lots of video snippets you can add to consecutive emails, your cadence could potentially be longer and perhaps more frequent.