State of outbound appointment setting: Trends and predictions

2024 has been a tough year for outbound appointment setting in B2B sales. According to Gong, 81% of CROs and VPs find their deals more complex than in 2022, while HubSpot says 54% of sales professionals find selling harder than in 2023.

The causes are simple: competition for the same deals, tighter client budgets, and heightened scrutiny over spending. As a result, businesses are seeing fewer wins, longer deal cycles, and shrinking deal sizes, with only 43% of sales reps hitting their quotas in Q1 2024 — down nearly 10% from 2022.

This begs the question: What sets high-performing sales teams apart, and what does 2025 hold? To explore this, we hosted a webinar with insights from 7 sales leaders:

• Taylor Ryan, CMO at Ocean.io
• Brian Minick, COO at ZeroBounce
• David Kreiger, President at SalesRoads
• Ilya Azovtsev, Ex-head of growth at Expandi.io
• Brian Hicks, VP of sales at Belkins
• Joey Williams, Director of sales development at Chili Piper
• Amir Reiter, CEO at CloudTask

Their insights — and those from other top practitioners — will help ensure you don’t just survive but thrive in 2025, no matter the economic outlook.

Outbound appointment setting strategies that worked in 2024

Beyond recession forecasts, traditional outbound tactics face resistance. At Belkins, for example, we saw our cold email lead-to-appointment conversion rate drop from 2.7% in 2023 to 0.8% post-recession. We’re not alone — many sales leaders report similar trends.

Challenges we’ve mentioned, including an overreliance on automation and AI, contribute to the dip in conversion rate. Though AI and automation make it easier to scale outbound efforts, they make it harder for reps to stand out and differentiate from the competition.

The oversaturation of outreach channels like email and LinkedIn has also made engaging buyers tougher. So, what works? Omnichannel outreach. Here, prospects get engaged across multiple channels — email, LinkedIn, and phone calls — to create a sense of omnipresence. We’ve implemented this for our clients and got optimum results.

We’ll later explore omnichannel outreach, its impact, and our framework for success. But now, let’s see the trends, predictions, and recommendations of top sales professionals who win outbound appointments against all odds.

High-quality list building

A high-quality lead list is the foundation for successful outbound appointment setting. Poor-quality leads render even the best templates or SDRs ineffective. Yet, according to HubSpot’s report, lack of high-quality leads is a negative trend and one of the top 3 challenges sales teams face.

To get ahead of this trend, Taylor Ryan, lead sourcing expert and CMO of Ocean.io, shares how to build a list of prospects with a high chance of converting. Here’s what Taylor recommends once you’ve created your ideal client profile (ICP):

• Consider the prospect’s stage in the sales funnel: Knowing where your prospect is on the funnel helps you understand how and when to reach out. For high- and low-intent leads who need a solution soon, you’ll need to differentiate your solution and drive action. But for problem-unaware leads, nurturing is key until they’re ready to buy.
• Create buying intent: Some might argue that creating demand isn’t a seller’s job. Mark Kosoglow, former VP of sales at Outreach, disagrees. He said, “That’s what leaders tell their sellers because they’re afraid to tell them your job is to create demand.”
  Heuristic evidence by Professor John Dawes shows that only about 20% of prospects are high-intent and ready to buy in a year. This percentage might be little to reach your goal. To overcome this challenge, Taylor uses and recommends 3 tactics for creating purchasing intent:
  • Share case studies: Show how clients succeeded with your product so prospects can envision the benefits.
  • Create fear of missing out (FOMO): Prospects dislike falling behind competitors. So highlight what your prospect’s competitors are doing and find creative ways to signpost missed opportunities.
  • Share an imperfect solution: When Taylor sold Planday, a workforce management platform, he would share a basic Excel spreadsheet with prospects. When this template invariably proves insufficient, it opens the door for him to pitch his product subtly.
• Pitch your competitors’ best customers: Target happy clients featured on competitors’ websites and use a respectful pitch.

“Hey, I see you’re currently working with {{competitor name}{, and I’ve heard great things about them. Our strengths differ in a few key areas, and I’d love to show you how we stand out. I think you’ll appreciate {{your key differentiator}{. Would you care to learn more over a quick chat?”

You can automate finding these leads using various tools. Any website that allows you to compare your solution to someone else’s can be useful. Sites like Capterra and Software Advice as well as tools like WebScraper.io, Octoparse.com, DataMiner.io, and ParseHub.com can help you pull these leads efficiently.

• Find competitors of your competitor’s best customers: Let’s say you sell Zoom and you’re competing with GoTo Meeting. If Belkins is a GoTo Meeting customer, then Belkins’ competitors likely need a video conferencing tool. Find those competitors and trigger FOMO with a pitch like this:

“Hey, I see that Belkins uses GoTo Meeting. Many industry leaders have found that switching to Zoom has given them a competitive edge in remote client presentations and internal communications.

Zoom provides a more intuitive user experience, higher-quality video, and seamless integrations with tools like Slack and Google Workspace, helping remote teams collaborate more efficiently. 

I’d love to show you how Zoom can enhance your virtual meetings and support your team’s success. Can we set up a quick call?”

You can automate finding these businesses using the Ocean.io lookalike search feature.

What to avoid

• Purchasing leads: Buying leads has always been risky, and our recent comparison shows it’s not worth the stress. A manually built list returns 5 times as many closed-won as a purchased one.

Source

• Building lists the old way: Pulling contacts from a database, filtering, exporting, and expecting results is yesterday’s news. Today, the best approach is to build on your existing customer base. 

Start by analyzing your best-closed deals, then use lookalike searches to find similar companies. Enrich the data and prioritize outreach based on intent signals.

Hyper-personalized cold emailing

2025 will be the year of hyper-personalized cold emails. Here’s why:

First, the inboxes of everyone are a hot mess right now. In 2023, 347.3 billion emails were sent daily and Statista projects 407.8 billion email sends by 2027.

The kicker? 45.6% of emails land in spam folders. Others languish in the promotions tab, have weak subject lines, or go unopened. Even when opened, most lack relevant, personalized offers buyers want. 

As Cognism CEO, James Isilay recently remarked, “I almost never see a truly personalized email.” This presents an opportunity to stand out. How? Write compelling, personalized cold emails that resonate with your ICP. Also, warm your email addresses and optimize for deliverability to ensure your emails land in inboxes.

Going forward, Brian Hicks, our VP of sales at Belkins, further recommends valuable tips for salespeople who want to get better outcomes from cold email outreach:

• Ditch open rates and focus on reply rates. As email filtration systems grow more sophisticated, open rates are becoming unreliable. Some receiving domains now scan messages for threats and trigger an “open” without the recipient ever seeing it.
  But reply rates provide a clearer picture — they show the recipient viewed your email and whether the email struck a chord with them.
• Consider targeting 2–4 prospects per organization for the best average reply rates. However, don’t contact over 3 people at once. Sending too many emails to the same company simultaneously can trigger spam filters and push your messages into the junk folder.
• Keep it succinct: 1,000 characters or fewer works best. Avoid bold text or colored fonts — what once grabbed attention now often triggers spam filters, landing your email in the junk folder.
• Follow 1 call-to-action (CTA) and 1 link rule. Don’t confuse or overwhelm prospects with multiple CTAs. If you’re using a relationship-building opener, ask a simple question without immediately requesting a meeting. If your goal is to book a sales call based on a specific pain point, stay focused on that objective with 1 clear CTA and 1 link.
• Use the same email service as your target accounts. Emails sent from Gmail to Gmail or Outlook to Outlook have higher chances of landing in the inbox. Use tools like MailCharts or MxToolbox to determine your prospect’s ESP.
• Update your email templates and sequences every 2 weeks. Spam checkers frequently update their criteria, including new words that can trigger flags. Even common phrases like “let’s set up a call” may land your emails in spam. 

If you’re using plain text in HTML formats for tracking pixels, ensure you also create a plain text version with your ESP. Spammers typically skip this step, making it a key indicator for spam filters.

What to avoid

• Be wary of obsolete data. Emailing expired contacts hurts your domain reputation and can lower your deliverability.
  At least 25.74% of emails decay annually, according to ZeroBounce. Consequently, Brian Minick, email deliverability expert and COO at ZeroBounce, recommends validating your database every quarter (at a minimum).
• Spam traps. A spam trap is an email address that appears real but doesn’t belong to a real person. These addresses are a spam prevention method created by Internet service providers (ISPs) and blacklist providers to lure in spammers and block them. 

Web scraping tools cannot distinguish between real emails and spam traps, and falling for this can severely damage your sender’s reputation. However, tools like ZeroBounce can help. Simply upload your email list manually, and it will purge any spam traps from your database.

📚 Related post: Cold email outreach strategy we use to generate B2B leads

Increased cold calling

Cold calling will make an epic comeback in 2025. You better believe it because our cofounder, Michael Maximoff, gathers more sellers are already on board. Why? For starters, this tactic isn’t used like others because 1 out of 2 B2B sales reps fear making cold calls.

In a study of 10,000 cold calls, Cognism found prospects answer on the first attempt 75% of the time. We believe this pick-up rate is driving the use of cold calls and predict more sellers will jump on the train.

David Kreiger, cold calling expert and president at SalesRoads, says the fundamentals of cold calling haven’t changed. However, he recommends that sales teams obsessively track and optimize certain cold calling metrics. 

* These benchmarks are the average across all market segments — SMBs, midmarket, and enterprise. Your benchmark will vary based on the segment you target.

Below are a few additional tips for a successful cold call outreach.

• Always call twice: Though inconvenient, “make sure you double tap,” says Bryan Tunick, manager of enterprise sales, at ZoomInfo. This matters because robocalls typically don’t call twice in a row. If the prospect answers the second call, simply say, “Hey {Name}, looks like I caught you! I was about to leave you a voice note.” Then smoothly transition into your conversation.
• Use permission-based openers: “It doesn’t matter how much you researched your prospect or how strong the intent is — they didn’t ask for a call,” says Jason Bay, founder and CEO at Outbound Squad. But with a permission-based opener, you allow the prospect to enter the conversation. Here’s a simple permission-based opening script:

Hey {{prospect’s name}}, it’s {{your name}}. I know you weren’t expecting my call. Do you have a minute for me to share the reason for my call and you can let me know if you want to continue chatting?

• Consider the “Have you heard about us” opener: This opener was popularized by Arman Farrokh, founder of 30 Minutes to President’s Club. It’s great for niche companies. For instance, if you work with government municipalities in the state of Texas or a specific county, you could say:  

Hey {{prospect’s name}}, it’s {{your name}}. I called because we work with a lot of contractors in the state of Texas like {{list companies you’ve worked with}}. Have you heard our name tossed around? 

• Call cell phones: “If you’re not using cell phones, you’re not using phones,” says Bryan Tunick. Brad Norgate, a former Cognism AE, echoes this sentiment: 

“I only call mobiles, really. I find the connection rate is way higher when calling mobiles. I’d say it’s about a 90/10 split in terms of the number of mobile numbers I call versus landlines.”

• Leave voicemails: People rarely call back because you left a voicemail. But the primary purpose of a voicemail isn’t to elicit a callback. Instead, it’s meant to prompt the recipient to check their email. Gong data shows that leaving voicemails can double your email reply rates from 2.73% to 5.87%. David also says people who leave voicemails get a 1% increase in connect rates. 

What to avoid

• Local presence dialing: “I think people assume that any number calling them from their own area code is spam,” says Bryan Tunick.
• Abusing cold calls: With cell phone pick-up rates so high, it’s tempting to overuse the opportunity to reach prospects directly. Don’t. Simply research your prospect beforehand and craft a script that grabs their attention. 

While irrelevant outreach can harm your reputation, hyper-relevant interactions can boost it. For example, after a positive cold call experience with SDR Kay-leigh Johnston, James praised the interaction on LinkedIn. The post’s high engagement demonstrates that this shoutout landed in the feed of other decision-makers. This visibility reflects well on Kay-leigh and her employer, Playroll, and it could also drive revenue.

Smarter LinkedIn prospecting

No one joins LinkedIn to get sales spam. Yet, the modus operandi of some salespeople is to connect and blast similar messages to potential prospects. This tactic is dead in the water, and reps eager for success must opt for smarter LinkedIn prospecting in 2025.

LinkedIn has taken strides to reduce spam by capping the number of connection requests users can send to about 100 per week. Such a connection limit might be small for an outbound motion. Fortunately, Ilya Azovtsev, former head of growth at Expandi.io, shares 2 hacks for extending it by at least 2.4 times. He also shares best practices for maximizing your outreach.

• Boost your Social Selling Index (SSI): The Social Selling Index reflects your LinkedIn activity and measures your effectiveness at social selling. It’s scored from 1 to 100, and a score of 65 or higher could increase your connection limit by up to 40%, according to Ilya. A high SSI also increases your campaign reach. To boost your SSI, start by optimizing your profile, then consistently post content and engage with others on the platform.
• Warm up before connecting: Engaging with a prospect’s account before sending a connection request can boost reply rates by up to 55%. Interact by liking their posts, commenting strategically, or endorsing their top skills. This builds familiarity, making it more likely they’ll accept your connection request.
  For example, Michael runs 2 campaigns simultaneously. In the “Builder” campaign, he regularly visits pages and engages without sending connection requests — essentially nurturing the relationship. Once prospects are warmed up, he moves them to the “Connector” campaign to send connection requests. This approach has led to a 40% connection rate, with a strong Social Selling Index (SSI) of 76-77.
• Expand your connection limit using a mobile connector: LinkedIn allows you to send additional connection requests through the mobile app, even after reaching your desktop limit.
  That said, conducting outreach via mobile can be cumbersome. Expandi’s Mobile Connector campaign solves this by simulating the mobile experience on your computer. This tool lets you bypass the desktop limit while maintaining the convenience of desktop-based outreach.
• Connect with ICPs who engage with your post: Scrape the profiles of your ideal customers who engage with your post and send a personalized connection request. For example, you could say, “I noticed you engaged with my post. I looked at your profile, and it seems there’s a match in what we do.”
• Use personalized videos to boost reply rates: According to Ilya, including a personalized video in your follow-up sequence boosts your reply rate by 2.3 times on average. A time-consuming strategy is to record multiple Loom videos.
  But with AI tools like Sendspark or Response.ai, you can create personalized videos at scale. These platforms allow you to record one video, which then gets customized for each prospect by cloning your voice. The resulting videos address each prospect by name and showcase their company’s website as the backdrop, enhancing the impression of personalization.
• Adapt your LinkedIn profile to the specific vertical you’re targeting: Ilya says tailoring your LinkedIn profile to a vertical can boost acceptance rates by up to 79%. 

When targeting a niche, such as startups that recently raised funding, customize key profile elements like your header, profile description, and banner to address their pain points. This makes you appear more relevant to their needs. 

If this feels odd, remember that companies use targeted messaging on their websites. For example, Salesforce’s home page focuses on SMBs despite its significant enterprise sales. As product marketing expert Anthony Pierri notes, “They could have summarized their total value across all segments.” Instead, Salesforce lets its site speak directly to SMBs while its account executives work on selling to enterprise-sized businesses.

What to avoid

• Cookie-based LinkedIn automation tools: LinkedIn is fighting against automation because many people use it to spam users.

LinkedIn intends to prevent the complete automation of data scraping and human interactions like messaging or commenting. This explains why billion-dollar LinkedIn automation tools like Apollo.io can operate without facing bans.

Until LinkedIn revises its terms, using automation carries the risk of losing your account. However, this risk is minimized by avoiding cookie-collecting automation tools and opting for cloud-based software like Apollo.io instead.

Omnichannel outreach: The way of the future

Joey Williams, director of sales development at Chili Piper, was very candid when we asked about their priority outbound channels.

Emerging trends support Joey’s insights. 

At Belkins, we’ve generated thousands of appointments through cold emails. But over time, standalone email campaigns have gotten less effective. Sopro’s 2024 State of Outbound report confirms this, showing a 22.2% drop in lead rates for email-only campaigns since 2022. 

Conversely, 75% of B2B companies report improved outcomes when combining email with other channels. Brian Minick of ZeroBounce echoes this shift toward a multichannel approach. Here’s why omnichannel outreach is essential today:

• Complex and longer sales cycle: B2B purchases often involve 6–10 decision-makers and high executive scrutiny. Dreamdata reports an average B2B buyer journey takes 192 days, with some extending beyond a year. Omnichannel outreach makes engaging and nurturing buyers throughout this extended cycle easier.
• Rapport building requires multiple touches: Closing deals requires 62 touches across 3 or more channels, according to Dreamdata, while McKinsey estimates at least 10 touchpoints. Omnichannel outreach keeps the momentum and gives the buyer a reason to stay engaged.
• Buyers do extensive research: HubSpot shows that B2B customers have increased their use of self-serve tools compared to the previous year. In fact, on average, only 5% of a B2B customer’s journey involves direct interaction with sales. Focusing solely on the later stages of the pipeline means you risk losing deals before the selling even starts.

Overview of our omnichannel outreach framework

Our approach engages prospects at every stage of the buyer’s journey, ensuring our clients stay top of mind when their prospects are ready to buy. The approach involves 4 stages:

1. Attention/engagement: Our lead research specialists start by sourcing prospects based on your ICP. We introduce them to your brand by sharing high-value content. These include your thought leadership articles, podcasts, and webinars distributed via SDR outreach and targeted social ads.
2. Activation: Prospects showing interest (e.g., attending webinars, downloading content) receive personalized outreach from SDRs, offering trials or strategy calls.
   These calls focus on building relationships and nurturing buying intent.
3. Conversion: We monitor clear buying intent through actions like frequent website visits, product inquiries, or demo bookings. SDRs track engagement and help schedule calls, while marketing provides sales enablement materials such as buying guides, case studies, and bottom-of-funnel content (BoFu). The sales team caters to the prospect’s needs and connects with decision-makers to create future opportunities.
4. Retention: After closing, we build long-term relationships through post-sale strategies that boost engagement and satisfaction. This may include exclusive webinars, email nurture campaigns, or cocreated content that positions the client as an industry thought leader.

The future of outbound appointment setting: How to prepare

Have experienced professionals on the wheels

Launching outbound without experience can be a costly misstep. 

Peep Laja, CEO of Wynter, recently shared an example of a founder attempting outbound outreach for a $1,500 ACV product despite limited success with inbound. This founder didn’t realize you need an average ACV of $3,000 to make outbound work. 

This is just one of many mistakes experienced salespeople can avoid. As mentioned earlier, top performers can double cold call conversions. It’s 1 reason David’s team avoids hiring fresh grads as SDRs. 

If you run an SMB or a bootstrapped company, the high pay for skilled sales talent in the U.S. may be a concern. A way to ease this challenge is by hiring remote talent beyond the U.S. through platforms like CloudTask. The salary expectations are up to 50% lower. Don’t skimp on benefits, though. To attract top-tier talent, consider offering health insurance, flexible hours, and opportunities for professional growth.

Hire people from companies similar to yours 

“If you’re a startup that builds pipeline on outbound, find someone who’s worked for a startup that built pipeline on outbound,” says Amir Reiter, CEO at CloudTask. Don’t make the mistake of bringing on someone from an enterprise company, as the required skills differ significantly.

Amir recalls closing a $600,000 deal during his time at NetSuite. Everybody congratulated him on a job well done. Yet, he said the sale was nearly effortless — all he did was answer emails. The real credit, he said, belonged to the millions NetSuite invested in customer education.

Hire account executives who can self-source

Economic conditions are pushing AEs to take greater ownership of their pipeline, with some companies now expecting AEs to self-source 20–30% of it. 

As Jason Bay notes, this shift makes sense since AEs often secure higher-quality appointments, especially at the enterprise level. However, there are 2 key issues leaders may overlook.

First, not all AEs have strong prospecting skills, and building them from scratch is no easy feat. Jason says, “If that muscle is not there, it’s like teaching an old dog new tricks.” So, simply hiring more without the support of SDRs won’t fix the issue. What you need are AEs who already excel at lead generation.

“It starts in the hiring process,” says Bryan Munick. Bryan further advises hiring AEs with extreme ownership — those with the “hunt built into them.” These are the AEs who can manage inbound leads but are also driven to find the best ones themselves.

Second, leaders may underestimate how long AEs need to self-source their leads, leading to unrealistic expectations and missed targets. The takeaway? The long-term solution to pipeline issues is training your SDR team to provide better-quality leads. This leads us to the next point.

📚 Related post: How to generate sales leads: A guide for sales managers 

Align SDRs with revenue

Ideally, AEs shouldn’t have to source their deals but have a dedicated SDR team providing them with high-quality appointments. But, unfortunately, most SDR teams do not align with revenue objectives.

For instance, sales development teams often reset appointments with prospects simply because they are easy to engage with, without considering whether these individuals are decision-makers or willing to champion the deal. Jack Reilly, principal revenue enablement manager at ZoomInfo, believes this misalignment is a key reason for many lost opportunities.

The solution? Offer the right training so SDRs can think like AEs who focus on setting meetings that drive revenue rather than filling the calendar. Joey explained how Chili Piper optimized their process to ensure they target accounts with a high likelihood of converting into customers.

• ICP identification and sourcing: Chili Piper shared what defines a good target account with SDRs.
• Automated account assignment: As the team grew, handling these tasks manually became cumbersome, so they automated the process using:
  • GoodFit and a web scraper to build the lead list based on their ICP
  • SEOquake for monitoring activity on prospects’ sites to spot potential needs
  • Distro to assign leads to the right rep promptly
• Trigger-based messaging: After identifying a lead, the SDR receives a notification and gets context on why the lead is a good fit. This helps the SDR craft its messaging effectively when reaching out to book a meeting.

Since implementing these systems, Joey says they’ve seen a 30% increase in the pipeline.

Have a system for reengaging lost deals

Closed-lost deals may still hold potential, and the right system may turn these missed opportunities into revenue. Here are a few ways to revive lost opportunities.

• Run tight pipeline reviews: As Bryan recommends, rigorous pipeline management is vital. Reps should differentiate between dead deals and those with a chance to close.
• Be prescriptive about why you lost deals. Jack advises to record detailed reasons for lost deals — whether because of budget, lack of decision-making power, poor timing, or other factors. This helps you better target the right opportunities for future reengagement.
• Target similar opportunities: Group deals lost for similar reasons and treat them in batches. This helps you address common objections efficiently.
• Make reengagement as valuable as new deal sourcing: Establish a culture where reengaging lost deals is celebrated as much as sourcing new ones. If it’s not measurable or celebrated, it’s unlikely to become a priority for the team. 
• Set a regular cadence for reengagement. Brian Hicks recommends reengaging with old leads every 6 months. 

The role of outbound appointment setting services

If you lack in-house outbound expertise, outsourcing your appointment setting to an agency is your best bet. Here are 3 key benefits of partnering with the right company for outbound appointment setting.

Specialized expertise

The best appointment setting company possesses both outbound and industry expertise. This lets them quickly understand your products and launch your campaign while your in-house team focuses on nurturing and closing deals. 

At Belkins, you benefit from the combined experience of our SDR team, lead researchers, copywriters, and email deliverability experts. You also leverage our omnichannel outreach expertise across various channels, including email, phone calls, SMS, LinkedIn, paid ads, and SEO content marketing, to fill your pipeline with qualified appointments.

Proven strategies

A reputable appointment setting company has proven strategies developed through experience with multiple clients across various industries. By leveraging their expertise, you can reduce guesswork and be better positioned to handle challenges effectively. 

At Belkins, we have developed proprietary software like Folderly and AI-based tools to ensure high email deliverability.

Fast results

Proven strategy + fast execution = quick results. 

At Belkins, we launch your campaign within 14 days, and you can expect to see results in 30 days. Having worked with over 1,000 clients across 50+ industries, we’ve set more than 200,000 appointments. 

If you need a dedicated team to secure quality outbound appointments, contact us to get started.

To access more resources, read our customer stories, listen to the Belkins Growth Podcast, and subscribe to our webinars for exclusive insights.