Should You Confirm Sales Appointments? The Pros and Cons.

After all the hard work bagging an appointment with an executive, should you give him an opportunity to change his mind and cancel it? This is a very important consideration for an appointment setting service. It often takes a minimum of 3 calls for a telemarketing service agent to get a firm appointment. Behind this appointment setting success is the hard work of the telemarketing company in setting goals with the client, training its appointment setting service agent with the clients’ products and industry knowledge, formulating and rehearsing the call script and overcoming call rejections. Precious man-hours were spent even before that first call was made. And more man-hours were spent by the telemarketing services company to track the executive and get him to agree to spare a few minutes for the sales agent to give a product presentation.

Should you risk all the hard work and ask just before the set appointment if the client still wants to push

through with the appointment?

Confirming an appointment before the scheduled meeting is considered a professional practice. Most executives and their secretaries expect that it would be done by the appointment setting service agent. It serves as a reminder to the executive and the secretary, in case the appointment was not entered in the work diary or was overlooked. It is also an insurance against a “no show” appointment.

On the other hand, confirming an appointment also gives the chance for the executive to give an excuse to cancel the appointment. This is perhaps the single most important negative aspect of confirming an appointment. Although the telemarketing service agent could always ask for another schedule, there’s always that nagging thought that had the appointment not been confirmed, perhaps the executive would have attended the meeting, as scheduled.

So, the questions remain, to confirm or not to confirm? The debate is still on.