Appointment Setting – Should your Sales People Do That?

Appointment setting is something sales people do every day. The question is, should they? Let’s do the math.

How do we determine the value of time a sales person in order to determine if they should be doing their own appointment setting? Let’s assume your sales rep has a quota of $2 million dollars in sales. Assuming 260 work days in a year – that $2 million quota equates to $8,000 per day or $1,000 per hour.

So should a sales person be doing their own appointment setting or focusing on creating partnerships and closing sales? Let’s look at what the average sales person must do each day. Many corporations empower their sales people with building their line of business – including cold calling, appointment setting, prospecting, developing a pipeline of opportunities and closing business.

An important question to ask is… should a sales rep whose time is valued at $1,000 per hour be cold calling, appointment setting and prospecting? Or should that function be outsourced to an organization whose core business, appointment setting, is doing that each and every day – at a higher level of effectiveness, with a higher level of predictability and at a much lower rate.

Now you are not paying your sales people $1,000 an hour; however, that is the amount of business they should be closing each hour. Should they be cold calling and appointment setting or should they be closing business? Should they be making the 100 calls to uncover an opportunity or should they be focusing only on opportunities to close business?

The bottom line is, a person who is accountable for generating $1,000 of revenue, on average, per hour should be allowed to do what they do best – close business. They should not be cold calling and appointment setting – they should be in front of your prospect, developing relationships and generating revenue. Appointment setting does not generate revenue – instead it generates a pipeline of opportunities.

Now that you’ve done the math, what do you want your top sales people doing on a daily basis? Do you want them cold calling and appointment setting to uncover opportunities or do you want them in front of prospects closing deals?