Are you ready for appointment setting? A readiness checklist

You're ready for appointment setting when you can take on new clients, you know who you want to meet, and someone can run a sales conversation and follow up quickly. If one of those is missing, booked calls or meetings tend to go to waste, however good they are.

Work through the checklist below. It takes about five minutes.

The checklist

Capacity

• You could start work for a new client in the next month or two
• Onboarding a new client wouldn't stall your current work
• You've thought about how many new conversations a month you could handle

Who you want to meet

• You can describe your best clients: sector, size, location
• You know which roles usually decide to buy what you sell
• You know which businesses you'd rather not work with

The offer

• You can explain what you sell in a sentence or two, in plain words
• You know roughly what a new client is worth to you over time
• Your pricing is clear enough to talk about on a first call

The conversation

• Someone on your team runs first sales conversations, and enjoys it
• They can follow up within a day or two
• You have somewhere to keep track of prospects, even a spreadsheet

Logistics

• You have regular times free for calls or meetings
• You're comfortable with prospects choosing phone, video or in person, or you know which you prefer

Reading your results

Most boxes ticked: you're in a good position. The next step is agreeing who to target and what counts as a qualified call or meeting. Our qualified meeting checklist helps.

Gaps in "Who you want to meet": start there. Look at your best five clients and what they have in common. Booked conversations with the wrong businesses cost time either way.

Gaps in "The conversation" or "Capacity": sort those first. The most common way appointment setting fails is good calls or meetings with nobody free to follow up.

Gaps in "The offer": tighten it before you scale outreach. A prospect who can't tell what you do in the first minute rarely books a second call.

If you're nearly there

You don't need everything perfect. Many businesses start with a small pilot: a narrow target, a short list of criteria and a set number of weeks. With GoodYarn you only pay for qualifying calls or meetings that take place, at a price agreed before we start. The pay-per-held-meeting guide explains how that works.