How much does B2B appointment setting cost?

Pricing is a monthly retainer, set by the meeting volume you want and how many targeting profiles you run. We quote on a call once we've looked at your market, because a campaign targeting UK recruitment agencies and one targeting US enterprise IT are not the same build. There's no setup fee and no long tie-in.

What's the difference between appointment setting and lead generation?

Lead generation gives you contact details and interest signals — you still have to work them. Appointment setting takes it to the end of the process: we run the outreach, handle the replies, qualify the prospect and put a confirmed meeting in your calendar. You join the call. If your team is short on time rather than short on names, appointment setting is the one that helps.

How many meetings will I get per month?

Most clients see 15 to 20 qualified meetings a month once a campaign is running. The range depends on your market size, your offer and how tightly you've defined your targeting. Narrower targeting usually means fewer meetings and better ones.

How do you qualify a meeting?

A meeting counts as qualified when the prospect matches your stated targeting profile, has decision-making authority or direct influence over the purchase, has confirmed a specific time, and understands what the call is about. We agree the exact criteria with you in writing before any campaign launches, so there's no argument later about what you're paying for.

Which industries do you cover?

We work across more than 300 B2B verticals, with the heaviest activity in recruitment, SaaS, IT services and marketing agencies. What matters more than your sector is whether your buyers are reachable by business email and your deal size justifies a booked meeting.

Which countries do you cover?

The UK and the USA. Our contact data covers over 11 million verified UK and US business contacts. We don't currently run campaigns outside these two markets.

How long until the first meeting is booked?

Around 30 days from signing, and that includes setup and infrastructure warm-up. The first one to two weeks go on targeting, list build, messaging and sending warm-up. Anyone promising booked meetings in week one is either skipping the warm-up or reusing a list, and both damage deliverability.

What happens after the meeting is booked?

The call is yours. We book the appointment and send reminders before it; you run the meeting and everything that follows — the pitch, the proposal, the close. We don't sell on your behalf and we don't take a cut of what you close.

Is your data GDPR compliant?

Our contact records are aggregated from publicly available business sources and cover business contacts in a business capacity. UK campaigns run on legitimate interest with opt-out honoured on every message, and we action removal requests immediately. US campaigns run under CAN-SPAM requirements.

Do I need my own sales team?

You need someone who can take the call and sell — a founder, an account executive, or one salesperson. What you don't need is an SDR function. The prospecting, outreach and booking is the part we replace.

LinkedIn vs Cold Email for B2B: Which Gets More Meetings?

3cpsmike
May 15
4 min read

Updated: Aug 12

LinkedIn and cold email are the two workhorses of B2B outbound. Both can fill a calendar with sales meetings, and both fail badly when used without thought. The question is not which one wins in the abstract, but which one fits your market, your buyer and your offer. This guide compares the two on reach, response, cost and effort, then shows where each earns its place, how to manage the risks of each, and how they work together to book more meetings than either does alone.

The honest answer: it depends on your market

There is no universal winner. Cold email scales to thousands of contacts and works well where business email is the norm and buyers are used to being approached in the inbox. LinkedIn is slower and more personal, and it shines where credibility and visibility matter more than raw volume. A campaign into US enterprise IT behaves differently from one into UK recruitment agencies, so the right lead channel changes with the audience. Start from who you are trying to reach, what they respond to, and how large the addressable market is, rather than from a preference for one tool over the other.

How cold email performs for B2B

Cold email's strength is scale and speed. You can reach a large, well-defined list quickly, test messaging fast, and attach useful material such as a short, specific case for a meeting. The trade-off is that inboxes are crowded and deliverability is fragile, so volume without warm-up and list hygiene simply lands in spam. Response rates are lower per message than LinkedIn, but the sheer reach means the absolute number of meetings can be higher when the list and the copy are right. Done properly, cold email is the most efficient way to book meetings at volume. Our guide to writing cold emails that get replies covers the structure that works, and it pairs naturally with well-planned multi-touch outreach sequences.

How LinkedIn performs for B2B

LinkedIn trades volume for warmth. A connection request and a genuine message reach people who may never open a cold email, and the platform lets you build familiarity through content before you ever pitch. It is strong for senior buyers where gatekeepers block calls and email, and for sectors where professional reputation carries weight, such as consulting, finance and recruitment. Reply rates are often higher than cold email because the approach feels personal and the sender is visible and verifiable. The limits are just as real: daily connection caps mean you cannot run it at the scale of email, and it takes more time per prospect. Our LinkedIn lead generation playbook sets out how to do it without burning your profile.

When to lead with cold email

Lead with cold email when your addressable market is large, your buyers are reachable by business email, and you need volume to hit a meeting target. It suits mid-market and SMB campaigns, tech-first industries where inbox culture dominates, and any situation where you want to test several messages quickly and learn what resonates. If your deal size justifies a booked meeting and you can define the list tightly, email will usually produce more meetings per hour of effort than LinkedIn alone, provided your sending infrastructure is warmed and your targeting is disciplined.

When to lead with LinkedIn

Lead with LinkedIn when you are targeting a small number of senior decision-makers, when your credibility on the platform is part of the sale, or when your market is already saturated with cold email and a different channel cuts through. It is also the better first touch when your product needs explaining and content can warm the prospect up over days or weeks. In these cases fewer, better conversations beat a high send volume, and a booked meeting from LinkedIn often arrives further along in intent. Knowing what a qualified meeting actually means helps you judge which channel is producing the right conversations, not merely the most.

Deliverability and profile health: the risks to manage

Each channel has a failure mode that quietly kills results. For cold email it is deliverability: send too fast from a cold domain, use spammy copy, or ignore bounce rates, and your messages stop reaching inboxes at all, often without any obvious warning. Warm-up, separate sending domains, tight list hygiene and honest opt-outs protect the asset. For LinkedIn it is account health: too many connection requests or messages in a day, or a pattern that looks automated, and the platform restricts or bans the profile you have spent months building. Both risks are managed by patience and restraint, which is exactly what teams under pressure to hit a number tend to abandon first.

How to measure which channel is winning

Do not judge the channels on reply rate alone. Track each one through to booked meetings, then to meetings that were genuinely qualified, and finally to pipeline created. A channel with a lower reply rate but higher meeting quality can be the better investment. Attribute meetings to the first-touch channel and to the sequence as a whole, because in a combined programme the email and the LinkedIn touch often share the credit. Watching the full path, rather than the top-of-funnel vanity numbers, is also how you spot a leaking funnel before it wastes a quarter of outreach.

The combination that books the most meetings

In practice the highest-converting outbound is not one channel but both, sequenced. A typical rhythm is a personalised email, a LinkedIn connection a couple of days later, a follow-up email, then a light LinkedIn touch, so the prospect sees your name across two places before deciding whether to reply. Prospects reached across more than one channel respond more often than those reached on a single channel, because familiarity lowers the barrier to replying. Treat email and LinkedIn as two halves of the same sequence rather than rival tactics, and you get the reach of email with the warmth of LinkedIn.

Running both channels well, at the same time, is where most in-house teams run out of hours. Talk to our team about combining cold email and LinkedIn into one system that books 15-20 qualified meetings a month for UK and USA companies, with you running the calls and us handling everything before them.