What is appointment setting?

What does appointment setting include?

• Choosing who to meet. Your ICP and the meeting definition: the titles, company sizes and regions that count.
• Outreach and follow-up. By email, phone or LinkedIn.
• Handling replies. Questions, scheduling, and the people who say no.
• Booking the call. On the calendar of the person who will run it.
• Getting it held. A no-show is not a meeting, so it gets rebooked.

Booked, held and qualified meetings

Appointment setting has a vocabulary problem. A booked meeting is a time on a calendar. A held meeting is a call that took place. A qualified meeting is a held call with someone who fits what you agreed to in advance.

The gap costs buyers money. OutboundPros, an outbound agency, gives an example: if an agency celebrates 20 booked meetings but 6 no-show and 5 are outside the target profile, "you did not buy 20 meetings. You bought 9 usable conversations."

How is appointment setting paid for?

Ask any provider what exactly you are paying for: a team's time, a booked meeting or a held one. The difference decides who pays for no-shows and wrong-fit calls. Dylan bills per held meeting by default: no-shows, people outside your definition, duplicates and companies on your do-not-contact list are never billed.

Agency, in-house or AI agent?

Belkins, the team behind Dylan, runs appointment setting as an agency service. Dylan is the AI agent version: email only, from his own mailboxes, paid per held meeting. To compare with an in-house team, the SDR cost calculator works out your cost per held meeting.