Category: Sales

Sales appointments play a crucial part in the sales journey, giving your sales reps the opportunity to further develop relationships with prospects and encourage them further along the sales cycle, towards the point of closing the sale. But which is better, phone appointments or face-to-face?

We’ve booked thousands of appointments for clients, across an array of different industries, both over the phone and face-to-face. Based on their experience, our expert Sales Directors feel that you should always strive to organise a face-to-face appointment.

We’ve listed their top three reasons to schedule a face-to-face appointment:

1. Higher uptake/contact rate

The world of business is a busy one, with schedules changing on a daily basis, even hourly, and unexpected tasks popping up. With this in mind, your prospects could find it tempting to ask their gatekeeper to hold their calls and deliver the all too familiar line;

“Sorry, they’re busy at the moment, could you send over some information?”

However, if you’re already sat in reception, or they’ve come to meet you, the meeting becomes harder to reschedule and ignore, so you’re therefore more likely to make immediate contact with your prospect.

2. Body language

A good sales professional will be able to read people and assess whether or not they are truly interested in a product/service quickly, in order to avoid wasting time on unqualified leads. Whilst it is possible to gauge a prospect’s degree of interest over the phone, there is more value in getting in a room with someone and paying attention to their body language – do they seem open or guarded, do they look bored or alert? And this works both ways, whilst sales calls, for some, are the bread and butter of being a sales professional, they can take their toll throughout the day. Removing yourself from the phone and offering a face-to-face appointment can let your prospect gauge your body language too and determine your investment in what you are selling.

3. Engagement

If the prospect is not directly in front of you, it’s impossible to know how well they are actually engaging with your conversation. Whilst they may say all of the right things or appear to be listening, they could also be answering emails, texting, or being distracted by their surroundings. If you want to truly engage your prospect and build a relationship based on rapport and trust, it is far better to organise a face-to-face appointment and talk directly to them.

Got a question about how to fill your diary with quality, face-to-face sales appointments? Give us a call on 0345 241 3038 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk

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What is the best thing about your job?

A fairly common question, asked by relatives, friends, new employees during an interview process. The answer, well my answer, is not normally based on the actual delivery of the job but more around the culture.

When you break the concept of work down, no matter who you are or what you’re doing, I can almost guarantee nobody likes the concept. You spend the majority of your life, typically working at least 8 hours per day, 5 out of 7 days per week. Within this you commute, you work hard, you may interact with people who may not be the characters you’d typically choose to spend time with and then you cram the rest of your life into the time you aren’t working.

Crazy when you break it down isn’t it! But we live in a world where we have to work to earn money to enjoy the ‘rest of our life’ segment.

So, for me, essentially culture is the difference between making work bearable, enjoyable, giving some meaning to all those hours, or not!

For both me and for Roots as a business (and part of the wider Air Marketing) culture is key.

Culture is the feeling that you get when you walk into the office, the relationships you build within the team and the support offered from those relationships. We want people to enjoy coming into work, into a thriving, high-performance, motivated environment. Having experienced workplaces where culture was never considered, where environments were tense and going into work was anything but enjoyable – I don’t want Team Roots to experience that. Of course, that doesn’t mean we eat cake, finish early or slack off daily, but what it does mean is that we have established some core aspects of our culture which our team can rely on including:

• Quarterly and yearly performance-based treat outings
• Idea brewing sessions – allowing everyone to be heard and new ideas to be brought to the table
• Friday end of day catch up meetings over a little tipple
• Monthly one-to-ones, no matter how long someone has been part of the business
• Monthly try something new Tuesdays as a team outside of work
• And much more…

You see our service is delivered by our team, so to get the most out of our team culture is key which in turn delivers even better results for our clients. It’s win-win with a happy, motivated team and happy clients.

In my eyes, it should never be just a job – you are investing precious time into this job which you can never get back – make it mean something.

Opinion piece by Verity Wootton, Associate Director

Appointment setting is a vital component if you want to build your business. After a prospect enters your sales journey, they need to convert into a lead to then become a sale, and what better way is there to do this than by setting aside time to talk to prospects and understand exactly what it is that they need or want?

However, appointment setting can often be a time-consuming challenge, both for small companies or those growing at speed, who lack the resources to manage and nurture their opportunities.

If this sounds familiar, then outsourcing your appointment setting to our team is a simple and effective way of giving you back the crucial time that you need to sit with prospects to ensure a sale through a meaningful interaction.

Our campaigns are straightforward to set up, all you need to do is give us a call and we will do all of the hard work for you – you’ll receive a proposal within 24 hours and then we can begin the process of allocating your account director, your dialling team and forming your campaign. On average, our client’s campaigns go live in just 4-6 weeks.

How can an appointment setting campaign help you?

Data Analysis: A call list is only as good as its quality. You may have hundreds of records, but if these aren’t qualified leads then you aren’t likely to get many appointments out of your calls. Our team will help you to gather and analyse data, ensuring that you are speaking to the appropriate decision makers who have a real investment in your offering.

Technology: You may be worried that in outsourcing your appointment setting campaign you lose that brand focus, however at Air we are able to replicate your internal teams processes and free them up to work on gathering leads. Our software allows us to mimic your local caller ID, use your personalised voicemail messages and track your prospects calls.

Skills: If you don’t have the capacity to hire an internal appointment setting team and you are currently passing this task to your sales team, you may be doing yourself a dis-service. Whilst they may be excellent sales people, appointment setting requires different skills. Cold calling requires dedicated diallers who aren’t demotivated by the perseverance that navigating discussions with gatekeepers requires. So, even though you may have an exuberant and energetic sales team who are brilliant at one-to-one discussions after the gatekeepers have been bypassed, this energy may not be maintained with the repetitive nature of appointment setting.

Automation: Much of the appointment setting process can be easily automated by our team so that we can process as many leads as you can send us. By automating parts of the process, i.e. calendar invitations, we can swiftly work through your data ensuring that as quality many appointments as possible are set.

Cost: At the end of the day, business boils down to money. In investing in outsourced appointment setting, you know the upfront cost of your appointment setting campaign and know that you can upscale or reduce those hours at any time. However, if you keep this in-house and hire a whole team, it will cost you a lot more in the long run.

If you feel that you could benefit from outsourcing your appointment setting to our expert team, get in touch today. Call us on: 0345 241 3038 or email: contact@air-marketing.co.uk.

Outsourcing your sales team can be an efficient and effective method for you to increase leads and sales opportunities, therefore aiding the growth of your business, without incurring the costs and time restraint demands that arise when on-boarding a team of full-time sales reps in-house. Outsourced sales are nothing new. However, companies are often still dubious when it comes to handing over a pivotal part of their business to an external party. It seems that there’ll be an everlasting debate – to outsource or hire in-house.

So, why might you need an outsourced sales team?

• Accelerated sales growth: Whilst your business is growing, or looking to expand further if established, you may not have the capacity in-house to deal with the flow of leads coming in or the time to outbound sell to new prospects. A dedicated outsourced sales team will take this weight off of your shoulders and allow you to accelerate your sales pipeline.
• Immediate access to sales expertise: Recruiting and on-boarding local talent is costly and often a time-consuming process, even once you have formed an in-house sales team, training each individual will be a lengthy process. When outsourcing a sales team, you will already have the raw talent there, with diallers who know what quality calls look like, it is just a matter of building their knowledge of your business and moulding their talent to fit around your product or service.
• Lower risk and overheads: Outsourced sales teams are used to working on multiple campaigns and picking up the intricacies of various campaigns swiftly. By working with experienced outsourced sales teams, you will be putting your sales into reliable hands, avoiding errors and reducing the on-going costs of in-house employees.
• Efficiency: For new business or those looking to launch a new product or service perhaps to a new market or industry, your management team will be putting much of their efforts into product development and marketing. By outsourcing to an experienced team, who have the time to dedicate to sales, you can focus on growth or launching your new campaign.

Could you benefit from using an experienced outsourced sales team, with experience across multiple sectors including Fintech, Saas, Professional Services and Energy? Then get in touch, call 0345 241 3038 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk

Ethical selling is not often something which springs to mind when people picture a sales person. Only 3% of people asked trust sales reps, so it’s not surprising that businesses can be reluctant to outsource their sales to an external team that they don’t know on a personal or professional level.

However, at Air we want to change that. We want to show that the vast majority of professionals in the outsourced sales industry are trustworthy people, looking to help businesses develop and grow. Of course, we have targets to meet and we are ultimately accountable to that, but what actually drives Team Air is people and, more importantly, our ability to build relationships with them.

From day one we are upfront and honest with both our clients and prospects, we base our entire sales journey on ethical selling. Offering a consultative approach, we work with our prospects and clients to help them to make smart businesses decisions.

We know it’s all well and good to hear us saying that, but let’s break down how we achieve it:

• Realistic campaigns and goals: If a prospect approaches us and we know that they simply can’t afford to work with us, or at least can’t afford to work with us in the way they want to, we tell them. We will never sell our services to a prospect who doesn’t stand a strong chance of generating tangible success with us, whether that is through ROI, conversations with decision makers or leads. That’s not to say that we won’t work with them full-stop, but we will arrange further conversations to better understand their budget and goals. From this, we either recommend a reduced campaign or other approaches that may work for them – such as digital marketing, utilising the services of our internal marketing company, Roots to Market.

• Transparency: At Air, we don’t just take your money and run with a campaign – we want you to be involved at every stage. When you express an interest in starting a campaign with us, we will invite you to the office to meet the team and view our office culture before you even start working with us. From there, you will be invited in to assist with the training of your dedicated dialling team and provide insight as well as getting a clear understanding of our approach. As the campaign runs you will receive weekly reports and calls as well as having access to our live time reporting system in the client portal.

• Accountability: Our campaigns are driven by learnings and so the strategy or approach may change throughout depending on the results that we generate. However, through your weekly calls and reports you will be made aware of this and able to see our reasoning and the difference in results. As well as reports, you also have access to every call made on your campaign, upon request, so that you can listen to how we handle your calls and prospects, ensuring that you are happy and can voice any concerns or questions that you may have.

If you are looking for an outsourced sales team, who place an emphasis on ethical selling, get in touch today. Email: contact@air-marketing.co.uk or call: 0345 241 3038.

As your business grows, you’ll find yourself having more and more conversations (both in person and over the phone) with potential leads. Whilst this is great news and shows that your business is developing good traction, do you really have the time to sift through all of those conversations to find the diamond in the rough? Unless you have an in-house sales team, the simple answer is probably no.

In order to close qualified leads, you need to be able to spend time talking to prospects after the initial stages of the sales cycle. This is where outsourced Inside Sales comes in.

Some people may be dubious of the benefits of inside sales at first, asking, “is it not just telemarketing?” Whilst both are predominantly phone-based selling, they deal with opposite ends of the sales cycle. Whereas telemarketers are often cold calling and forming a first point of contact between a business and potential client, inside sales reps act as a final touchpoint, being the ‘expert’ and nurturing or closing warm leads.

With continuous developments in technology, inside sales is growing 15 times faster than field sales and buyers are becoming increasingly comfortable holding remote conversations and making remote purchases. But how does inside sales differ from traditional sales? And how can it become your secret weapon?

1. Location

Similar to telemarketers, inside sales reps work in the office, contacting their leads via phone, email or video calls. This method of sales is both time and cost effective when compared to field sales reps who may find themselves travelling up and down the country attending dinners, presentations and meetings.  By having your sales team all in one place, they are always contactable and not prey to delayed transport or miscommunication of locations.

2. Technology

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are vital in assisting inside sales team and ensuring a smooth sales operation. In having a CRM assisting your sales, all prospect information, campaign updates, messages and appointments can be kept in one place and visible to both your team and yourself. Also, if you do choose to employ both inside sales and field sales, your inside sales can do the ground work and then pass key information on to your field sales team. At Air, we also offer full reporting. We understand that it can be daunting to outsource your sales activity which is why we created a unique client portal where you can see your campaign and it’s results in live time.

3. Scalability

You may have the best field sales rep in the world or be amazing at closing yourself but if you’re generating a large sales pipeline, who is going to manage all of those leads.  By having inside sales reps that work as a first touch point, a relationship can be built and solidified before you or your field sales rep gets to the prospect. It also allows you to reach a broader audience, even a global one if you see your market growing to that extent. Team Air are experts at holding conversations with senior decision makers in businesses of all sizes and locations – we’ve even worked with a company in Bermuda.

At Air, our inside sales team is driven and dedicated to getting you the results that you want, often exceeding expectations. If you feel that you could benefit from working with our expert team then get in touch – call: 0345 241 3038 or email: contact@air-marketing.co.uk