Cien’s Growth Essentials Series: What Value Can Your Company Get from Appointment Setting Services?

By Rob Kall, CEO & Co-Founder, Cien.ai

“Our team of experts will scale your email outreach and fill your calendar with qualified meetings. You only pay for leads that convert.“

– Every Lead Gen. Company Ever

2-3 Solicitations in My Inbox Every Day… 

As the CEO of a tech company, hardly a day goes by without receiving multiple emails from different Appointment Setting Services. They promise to solve my sales problems – instant pipeline and new sales with minimal effort, risk, and cost. Too good to be true? Perhaps, let’s dig into it! 

How Do Appointment Setting Services Work? 

Every Appointment Setting Service claims to have proprietary processes, well-trained staff, and advanced technology. Ultimately, most services rely on low-cost/low-skilled staff, often overseas, and automated outreach, prioritizing quantity over quality. Acting as an outsourced SDR team, they attempt to optimize success rates despite limited industry expertise. Using ICPs (Ideal Customer Profile) and custom scripts, they target key stakeholders, sometimes creating lead gen funnels with landing pages and content to expand outreach beyond existing lists. 

Important Considerations If You Are Using an Appointment Setting Service

An Appointment Setting Service is unlikely to resolve sales issues stemming from unproven product-market fit, low reputation, or lack of value proof. Young companies often face these challenges, and the best way to address them is for your internal team to engage directly with customers, uncover what resonates, identify the most valuable aspects of your service, and pinpoint weaknesses. An overseas team making brief calls cannot provide these insights. Moreover, it’s generally unwise to let an Appointment Setting Service contact existing customers. They may not grasp the nuances of support issues or product needs, potentially harming customer relationships. 

The Benefit of New Logo Growth 

Let’s discuss the key use case for Appointment Setting Services: prospecting for new logo customers. After analyzing hundreds of companies’ sales performance, a clear pattern emerges: new logo growth is rapid in the early years, but as a company builds a customer base—especially in SaaS businesses—most revenue begins to come from repeat sales. This compounding growth drives well-executing startups to unicorn valuations. However, during this phase, new logo growth often slows or stalls entirely. Leveraging an outsourced team to target prospects in new locations, industries, or through fresh approaches can add significant value. These new logos also create future upselling opportunities, compounding long-term benefits. 

How to Measure the Value Delivered by an Appointment Setting Service

Now, let’s get analytical: The most basic success metric is the number of meetings an Appointment Setting Service arranges. However, as any experienced sales leader knows, unqualified meetings waste the sales team’s time. Prospects who are no-shows, aren’t a good fit, or are the wrong size have little chance of converting into meaningful sales. That’s why some companies measure the pipeline generated by SDRs and Appointment Setting Services instead, though this approach is still limited. It’s easy to create a new pipeline (just enter an opportunity with an amount into the CRM), but much harder to create a quality one. 
While sales organizations often have process checklists to prevent poorly qualified opportunities, many still slip through. Also, it’s important to analyze the new logo and existing customer pipelines separately to avoid flawed conclusions. The quality (probability of winning) of renewal and upselling pipelines is often 2-3 times better than for new logo deals. With opportunity scoring, you can measure the true value of your pipeline. 
For example, if your SDR team created $10M in a new logo pipeline last quarter with an average 20% win probability, they delivered $2M in value. If your Appointment Setting Service generated $5M at an 18% win probability, they contributed $900K in value. By dividing the costs of the SDR team (including managers) and comparing them to the fees for the appointment-setting service, you can calculate the true ROI for both.

How Does Success Look?

An Appointment Setting Service can add significant value under specific conditions: if your SDR team is busy building a pipeline with new and existing customers in proven segments, and the service can deliver a pipeline of similar quality at a competitive cost. In this case, they can help you cover more whitespace and accelerate new logo growth ahead of your peers. However, using them to address other challenges often leads to frustration and poor ROI. 

About The Cien.ai Growth Essentials Series

This article is part of our Growth Essentials Series, inspired by our work with B2B business leaders, growth consultants, and PE operating partners. These articles focus on the non-technical aspects of improving GTM performance. If you want to dig in on the technical details of how to measure the concepts we use here, please refer to our “Practical RevOps Analytics Series”.