Appointment setting vs. lead generation services: What to choose?

When the lead flow slows down, and your sales team lacks qualified appointments, it's usually a sign you need to boost your lead generation efforts. But is that always the case?

Roughly half of Belkins' clients come asking for lead generation service, then realize they need appointment setting instead. Both services bring in new leads but impact your B2B sales funnel differently.

At a glance, lead generation involves finding prospects, generating product or service demand, gathering data, and preparing a lead contact list for the next steps. Appointment setting, in contrast, is about turning those leads into high-value sales meetings, identifying the right decision makers to talk to, building relationships with them, and eventually increasing the close rate.

This article breaks down the differences between lead generation and appointment setting services in more detail. Our delivery team's experts have also shared which service is best for different scenarios so that you can make an informed decision.

B2B lead generation vs. appointment setting services

The services span different sales funnel stages with different key focuses, strategies, metrics, and outcomes.

Here's a quick difference recap:

Funnel stage and key focus

Lead generation services cover the top-of-the-funnel processes, whereas appointment setting services help to move leads further down to the middle and bottom of the funnel.

Lead generation focuses on demand generation, capturing and organizing information about leads — such as buyer intent, industry, and engagement history. It helps shape your marketing and sales strategies, making it easier to qualify prospects during the next outreach stages.

It’s imperative to build a solid top-of-funnel motion to help grow business awareness. And that’s why lead generation prioritizes lead quantity over quality to get as much contact information as possible for further qualification.

The focus of an appointment setting company is narrower — qualifying leads that match the ICP, creating personalized messaging for them, and converting leads into sales calls through targeted outreach campaigns.

Appointment setting plays a crucial role in building relationships with potential customers and moving them to the bottom of the funnel — the purchase stage. Unlike lead generation, it prioritizes quality over quantity to ensure every prospect has a high buying intent. At the same time, it brings results in 3–6 months and is ideal to boost revenue quickly.

📚 Related posts: 

• What is B2B appointment setting and when to use it
• How to qualify B2B leads for better sales closing rates

Strategies

Lead generation services use inbound, outbound, or allbound strategies to connect with and gather information on larger groups of potential customers. These strategies often cast a wide net and include various tactics.

Inbound lead generation tactics attract leads looking for solutions in your industry and establish your brand as a trusted authority. The goal is to engage with these leads and gather information about them. A research team finds their contact information, either manually or using various tools. Alternatively, leads may share their contact details in exchange for gated content.

Outbound lead generation tactics involve searching out potential leads instead of just waiting for them to come to you. These tactics also gather data from your outreach efforts — like the responses you get from emails or calls — to create a detailed profile for each lead. You can then use these profiles to personalize your approach and make your appointment setting campaigns more effective.

📚 Related posts:

• How to generate outbound leads in B2B
• How to generate inbound leads in B2B
• Inbound vs. outbound marketing: What works best in B2B?

Appointment setting services use outbound outreach channels (in most cases) to contact leads and see if they're interested in taking a sales call. The outreach campaigns are built on lead qualification and scoring, advanced personalization, and value propositions and messaging tailored to each individual.

The most common strategies include the following:

• A single-channel focused outreach campaign involves using personalized messaging to build stronger rapport with qualified prospects through one channel, such as cold email outreach, cold calling, or social media messaging. For example, we generated 34 appointments in 2 months for one of our clients by focusing solely on cold email outreach.
  
• A multichannel outreach campaign involves a mix of different channels that resonate with prospects to increase the chances of a reply. Usually, the channels are not synchronized as one strategic campaign and are used randomly.
• Omnichannel outreach campaign (Belkins’ specialty) focuses on providing a seamless, personalized customer experience by integrating all channels and reaching prospects in a coordinated sequence (e.g., step 1: LinkedIn outreach; step 2: email outreach; step 3: intent-based calling, etc.). Since the channels are interconnected, customers can move smoothly from one channel to another without having to repeat information.

📚 Related posts:

• How to create an optimized appointment setting funnel
• How to set achievable appointment setting goals for your sales team

Key metrics

Both lead generation and appointment setting are numbers games but with different metrics.

For lead generation services, the focus is on capturing and engaging potential customers and tracking metrics that measure its effectiveness. Key KPIs include:

• Number of leads generated is the volume of leads with contact info produced through various lead generation activities.
• Cost per lead (CPL) measures the average cost associated with acquiring each lead, assessing tactic efficiency.
• Lead quality score evaluates how closely leads align with target criteria and their potential conversion value.
• MQL and SQL conversion rate tracks the percentage of visitors or prospects who become qualified leads, indicating the effectiveness of lead generation tactics, reflecting the effectiveness of lead qualification and the alignment between marketing and sales teams.

Appointment setting services focus on securing meetings and advancing leads in the sales pipeline. Key KPIs to track include:

• Number of appointments scheduled tracks the total count of meetings set from appointment setting activities.
• Lead-to-appointment conversion rate measures the percentage of leads converting into scheduled meetings, reflecting outreach effectiveness.
• Cost per appointment (CPA) calculates the average cost for each appointment secured, providing insight into tactic efficiency.
• Show rate for appointments measures the percentage of scheduled meetings attended by leads, showing commitment and outreach effectiveness.
• Post-appointment conversion rate tracks the percentage of meetings that lead to further steps, such as sales or follow-ups.

📚 Related posts:

• How to measure B2B sales: Key metrics and KPIs to track
• How to improve appointment rate in B2B sales

Outcomes 

Prolific lead generation companies commit to capturing and delivering the information on inbound and outbound leads for future appointment setting. Although lead generation is effective at building brand awareness and supporting marketing strategy effectiveness via wider audience reach, these leads still need to be scored and qualified.

Appointment setting services go a step further by delivering a fixed number of booked meetings with qualified prospects who align with your ICP. These services ensure that the prospects attending the meetings are decision-makers with a genuine interest in buying. Top appointment setting companies also handle follow-up tasks and utilize omnichannel communication—such as email, phone calls, and LinkedIn messaging—to create a seamless experience for leads.

This approach helps minimize no-shows and boosts the appointment setting rate by keeping prospects engaged and informed throughout the process, ultimately enhancing the quality and consistency of post-appointment interactions.

When to choose lead generation services over appointment setting 

You don't have lead researchers and want to reduce SDR workload

With the time-intensive task of identifying and gathering information on potential leads handled externally, your SDRs can concentrate on engaging leads and moving them through the sales pipeline. This streamlined approach allows your team to allocate more time to relationship-building and higher-value sales activities.

You want to test new channels, with no previous experience

Lead generation services are ideal when you’re exploring new channels or expanding into areas where your team lacks experience. Whether it’s inbound channels like content marketing or outbound tactics like social media prospecting, lead generation specialists bring the expertise needed to navigate these channels effectively. This drives more qualified leads to your sales team without requiring an in-depth understanding of the channel internally.

You prefer to keep outreach in-house

If your business has a strong internal outreach process and prefers not to outsource that aspect, lead generation alone can supply a steady stream of potential contacts for your sales team to engage with directly. This setup allows you to maintain control over how leads are contacted and nurtured, ensuring that outreach efforts align closely with your brand and sales strategy.

You practice a self-service or hybrid B2B sales model 

If your company has an innovative self-service model for B2B prospects (which includes price calculators, a free demo account, or interactive buyer guides) in which users can go through the full life cycle on their own, then opting only for lead generation services is a great strategic decision. Lead generation alone effectively fills the pipeline, empowering your company to convert leads into meetings and further sales independently.

If your selling model is hybrid, which generates up to 50% more revenue than self-service, you can also benefit from demand generation services to increase traffic to your lead gen assets. But in this case, appointment setting services may help accelerate the B2B sales cycle and convert hesitant buyers stuck at the consideration stage.

📚 Related post: 10 best B2B lead generation companies for 2024

When to choose appointment setting services over lead generation

You need faster revenue generation

If your primary goal is to accelerate the sales cycle and increase ROI, appointment setting brings these results in 3–6 months. Unlike lead generation, which captures broad interest, appointment setting ensures you’re only engaging with high-quality prospects who are more likely to convert, enabling faster revenue generation. In addition, by targeting leads via an omnichannel approach, appointment setting services minimize lead drop-off by keeping prospects engaged.

You want to test hypotheses or go-to-market (GTM) strategies 

When testing a new hypothesis or GTM strategy, appointment setting allows for immediate feedback. It facilitates direct conversations with prospects, allowing your team to gather information on your product, pricing, and messaging. These insights help validate (or refine) your GTM strategy in real time, ensuring that you’re on the right track or identifying areas for improvement early on.

If certain aspects of the GTM approach aren’t resonating, you can adjust and test new messaging or positioning with subsequent appointments. This iterative process accelerates the path to product-market fit and ensures that your strategy evolves based on real-world feedback.

Your inbound lead flow isn’t meeting KPI

Relying solely on inbound leads can be limiting, especially if lead volumes are falling short. Appointment setting enables proactive outreach to qualified prospects, supplementing inbound flow by directly engaging potential customers.

By prioritizing targeted, qualified leads and applying an omnichannel approach, an appointment setting service helps improve the overall lead-to-sale conversion rate, even if inbound lead volume is lacking.

You look for diversification across all channels

When you want to utilize all channels to maximize reach and impact, appointment setting can complement existing lead generation efforts by engaging leads directly across various platforms. Omnichannel appointment setting — when all channels are synchronized — enhances your brand’s presence and creates touchpoints that engage prospects in a strategic consequence, improving the likelihood of booking meetings and, ultimately, converting leads.

You target decision-makers in niche markets

When working within a niche market that requires direct contact with decision-makers, such as in heavy manufacturing with long sales cycles, appointment setting allows for a personalized approach that can build trust and demonstrate value early on. Lead generation can identify these prospects but doesn’t provide the direct interaction necessary to build rapport and trust, which is critical when dealing with key stakeholders.

Here’s a prominent case: Our client had a strong online presence and over 20 marketing channels at their disposal, but they still struggled with the number of sales appointments. To boost their lead-to-appointment rate, we conducted targeted research to identify high-value prospects from large companies in key industries like oil and gas.

Since February 2023, we have launched 77 customized email campaigns tailored to specific regions and ideal customer profiles, promoting the client’s offerings. This strategic appointment-setting approach drove 330 booked appointments in 15 months, which resulted in 120% monthly KPI.

📚 Related post: 8 best B2B appointment setting service companies in 2024

Is it a good idea to hire a different vendor for each service?

You can try combining lead generation services from one vendor with appointment setting services from another. It might work in some scenarios.

But it isn’t the best solution. With all channels being oversaturated, an allbound and omnichannel approach is the only way to guarantee a high number of appointments. Since lead generation and appointment setting are consecutive steps in a sales funnel, the best way is to choose one strategic partner for both to ensure your marketing and sales are aligned. 

Take it from our sales executive, Brian Hicks: 

Recommended lead generation and appointment setting companies

Need some recs? Here are the 2 top-rated companies.

Belkins

Our agency's number one differentiator — and the thing that should matter most to any B2B company hiring an appointment setting agency — is that we use an omnichannel approach to appointment setting. Since every single channel for contacting leads is oversaturated, synchronized touchpoints across more than 3 channels help better target your ideal buyers and get their attention, ultimately securing a predictable flow of meetings.

Combined with precise targeting and highly personalized outreach campaigns, the omnichannel approach helps build relationships with prospects and convert them into sales calls effectively. 

With this approach, we maintain a seamless sales process and ensure a smooth transition of leads through the funnel stages. And the numbers speak for themselves: Since 2017, we’ve scheduled over 200,000 appointments and generated over 5 million leads for our clients.

Check more success stories. 

Revit

Revit has a flexible pay-per-appointment (PPA) model, where you pay a monthly retainer plus per-appointment fee or commission fee on closed deals for their relentless lead generation work. This is the best choice for small businesses with 5–10 team members and some margin to try outbound.

The advantages are predictable pricing, guaranteed results, and high scalability. Plus, you don’t waste time or funds on low-qualified prospects. However, it may not work for companies with longer sales cycles, where nurturing leads and building rapport are key to closing sales.

Know which service you need? Contact us, and let’s get the deals rolling!