Appointment setting
B2B appointment setting, qualified before it reaches your diary.
Outsourced appointment setting for UK B2B companies. Experienced reps book video meetings with the decision makers you choose, against criteria you set, and confirm them before the day. Phone-led, with email and LinkedIn on the same cadence and a manager on the calls.
Appointment setting is the part of sales development that ends in a date. A rep finds the person who decides, has the conversation and books a meeting with your closer. The meeting is only worth having if the person fits, the problem is real and they turn up. This page is about those three things.
What counts as a qualified appointment
There is no industry standard for “qualified”, which is why so many appointment-setting engagements end in an argument about it. We agree the criteria with you in week one and write them into the brief, so a meeting either meets them or it does not. Most clients use some version of these five.
The right company.
Inside the market you described - sector, size, geography - and on the board for a reason: a hire, a new site, a change at the top, an audit due.
The right person.
The person who owns the problem, the budget or both. Not whoever answered the switchboard.
A real need.
They have said in their own words that the problem exists at their company, and the rep writes down how they said it.
A reason to talk now.
A trigger, a timeline or a review date. “Not this year” is a follow-up, not a meeting.
Where they are today.
What they use now, who supplies it, and what would have to be true for them to change.
BANT - budget, authority, need, timeline - is the older version of the same idea. Budget is the one a buyer is least likely to discuss on a first call, so we only qualify on it if you ask us to.
How a meeting gets booked
The conversation.
Most meetings are agreed on the phone, in a call about the prospect’s problem rather than your product. Email and LinkedIn run on the same cadence, so the call is expected and the follow-up lands.
The invitation.
A calendar invitation from your domain, with a video link, the purpose in a line and the name of the person they will meet.
The handover.
Your closer gets what the rep learned before the meeting: who the prospect is, why they took the call, and what they said about the problem. What a good handover contains.
The confirmation.
The rep who booked the meeting confirms it before the day. In our experience a meeting agreed with a person is kept more often than one agreed with a calendar link.
The feedback.
You tell us how it went. A poor fit tightens the criteria for the next one; a no-show goes back to the rep who booked it.
Why booked meetings do not happen
A meeting that does not take place costs a closer an hour and a rep a relationship. The usual causes are that it was pushed rather than agreed, that it was booked so far out it stopped meaning anything, or that nobody confirmed it. None of those are fixed by booking more. For LGN.AI, selling enterprise edge AI into mining, manufacturing and industrial infrastructure, 87 per cent of booked meetings were attended. Five habits that keep meetings in the diary.
Pay per appointment, or pay for the function
Appointment setting is sold in two ways. Pay-per-appointment charges for each meeting booked; a retained function charges for the team doing the work. We do not publish a price for either, but the difference in what each one pays a provider to do is worth knowing before you choose. The published UK ranges for each are in outsourced SDR pricing in the UK.
| Aspect | Pay per appointment | A retained function (how we work) |
|---|---|---|
| What you pay for | Each meeting booked | The rep, the manager, the data and the platform |
| What the provider is paid to do | Book meetings that pass the definition | Book meetings that turn into pipeline |
| The fourth touch | Rarely paid for, so rarely made | Part of the cadence |
| Where the conversation goes | Whether a meeting counted | Whether the market is responding, and why |
| Suits | A narrow market and a simple offer | A considered sale to a senior buyer |
What it has looked like
- GP Triage - an average of fifteen qualified decision-maker meetings a month across NHS practices, primary care networks and integrated care boards.
- 3media - three meetings a week on average with estate agency owners and directors, booked and confirmed for 3media’s sales team.
- Few Days Halong - more than twelve qualified B2B meetings a month with travel agencies overseas.
- NeverBland - more than forty fully qualified meetings, and £475k of pipeline from them.
For a sense of scale, the median monthly quota for fully qualified meetings in The Bridge Group’s 2025 research was nine, in a sample that was mostly North American and mostly SaaS.
Sources: The Bridge Group, 2025 SDR Models and Metrics report.
Who it is for
UK B2B companies with a closer and a diary, and nobody whose whole job is filling it. It works across the sectors we have sold into, and it is one part of an outsourced SDR function: the same reps, the same manager and the same platform, measured on the meetings that happen.
In their words
We were happy with the work Caption did on our campaign and pleased with the results. They took a Microsoft proposition that is not an easy cold conversation and got it in front of IT leadership at established professional services firms, and the people they put in front of us were actively looking for what we do and keen to keep talking. We are not looking at other lead generation companies.
Read the HG Technology case study, or see all our clients’ stories.
Questions about appointment setting
What is B2B appointment setting?
Outbound prospecting that ends in a booked meeting. A rep finds the decision maker, starts the conversation by phone, email or LinkedIn, qualifies them against criteria you set and books a meeting into your salesperson’s calendar.
Is appointment setting the same as lead generation?
No. Lead generation can end in a name, or a name with some interest attached. Appointment setting ends in a meeting with a date, a person and a reason. The lead generation page sets out the difference.
How many appointments a month should we expect?
It depends on the market, the offer and how senior the buyer is, so we will not promise a number before we have built the board. The case studies give real figures: GP Triage averaged fifteen a month, 3media three a week, Few Days Halong more than twelve a month.
How quickly can the first meetings be booked?
Inside the first month. The first dial is around three weeks after the brief, and the first qualified meetings are booked before the month is out. What happens in each of the three weeks.
Who takes the meetings?
You do - a founder, a closer, whoever runs your sales conversation. The meetings go into their calendar, under your name.
Do you use a script?
A structure rather than a script: the opening line from the signal that put the company on the board, the questions that qualify, and the objection handling agreed with you. A manager listens to live calls and adjusts it every week. The five parts of the call.
Tell us who you want to meet. We will show you who is there.
Send the brief and we build the board first, so you can see the companies and the people before a single meeting is booked.
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