Traditional sales meeting scheduling is a productivity killer for any sales team.
The amount of time spent on back-and-forth emails trying to find a time that works for everyone (often in different time zones) is time that your salespeople could spend closing more deals.
This is where sales meeting scheduling automation comes in. By using automation in your scheduling, you will significantly reduce the time spent on booking and arranging meetings by streamlining the most time-consuming parts of the process.
Did we mention it also has a direct impact on your sales team’s number of closed wons? If that isn’t a win-win (or should we say won-won), then we don’t know what is.
Scheduling a meeting traditionally (with multiple back-and-forth emails) takes time. This time takes a toll not only on the efficiency of your sales team but also on your prospect’s degree of interest.
The further away the meeting is from your first touch with the prospect, the more excitement they will lose about your solution and the more time they will have to check out your competitors.
According to Vorsight, 70% of meetings occur when scheduled within 9 days versus only 47% when scheduled more than 30 days out.
You want to get your prospect on a call as soon as possible. The more you wait, the more you increase the chances of a no-show, or of your warm prospect turning ice cold.
Using sales meeting scheduling automation, you’ll be able to reduce the time spent on scheduling meetings, boost your sales team’s productivity, and close more deals.
Here are some of the best tips you can implement right away to automate your meeting scheduling.
The most effective way to automate your sales meeting scheduling and improve your speed to lead is to use technology that is built specifically for this purpose.
Many sales teams worldwide rely on scheduling software to automate their sales meeting booking process. In fact, SoftwareAdvice reports that 61% of companies use scheduling tools.
Scheduling software like YouCanBook.me has a variety of features that will help you:
Essential features for sales teams include allowing your prospects to pick a time that works for both of you in a couple of clicks, sending your prospects automated meeting reminders, and setting up a group availability calendar to manage your team’s schedule in one place.
If your goal is to automate repetitive tasks that take a lot of time, implementing scheduling software into your sales workflow is the best choice you can make.
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Maximize your sales team’s productivity by distributing meetings between sales reps.
It will also help you book more appointments by offering more available slots to your prospects, thus increasing the chances they’ll find a time that works best for them.
You can do this manually, by keeping track of your team’s availability in a spreadsheet and assigning leads to sales reps accordingly, or you can use a tool to automate it.
In YouCanBook.me, for example, you can list your team’s availability in one centralized location, and send your leads a booking link that allows them to choose any slot from your team’s shared availability.
Create meeting slots based on the main objective of each meeting.
If it’s an initial discovery session, Presales Rockstars suggests that its duration shouldn’t be more than 20 minutes.
The purpose of the meeting is to determine whether the prospect is a good fit for your product and vice versa, not to give a detailed demonstration of all your product’s features.
Leave the in-depth presentation for product demos. Gong reports that successful sales demos are 47 minutes long, on average.
By creating meeting slots of different lengths to suit the purpose of each type of meeting in your sales process, you’ll save time and improve your sales team’s efficiency.
To go to the next level in automating your sales meeting scheduling, you will need to integrate it into your current tech stack and workflows.
For example, if you use a cold email tool for your sales outreach, you’ll want to be able to automate the process of adding your meeting link to your outreach emails.
Or, if you want to update the status of your prospect in your sales CRM after each meeting, you’ll want to have a way to automate that as opposed to doing it manually.
Here again, is where an online scheduling tool comes in handy.
YouCanBook.me, for example, integrates through Zapier with CRMs like Hubspot and Pipedrive as well as various other sales and marketing software to allow you to connect your meeting scheduling into your main-grid of tools, resulting in automated workflows and better overall pipeline management.
Discovery meetings and demos are not a salesperson’s only responsibilities. Prospecting via LinkedIn and email, nurturing prospects via the same, gathering feedback, updating the CRM, and internal reports are also part of a salesperson’s day-to-day.
Time spent in meetings needs to be capped in order to achieve a balance between meetings and other responsibilities.
Setting a limit on the number of appointments your sales reps can take in a single day would help achieve that.
The exact number depends on the structure of your team and the way you handle prospects.
For product demos (which are 40 minutes long on average), Salesloft recommends the ideal number of meetings is 4 per day.
Many prospect inquiries come from website landing pages. These landing pages usually ask prospects to fill out a web form, and then it’s up to a sales rep to follow up on the leads, usually via email.
The process can be automated by allowing prospects to book a discovery meeting directly from the landing page.
This will reduce the number of follow-ups a sales rep needs to do right off the bat, and reduce the risk of the lead becoming cold.
However, there is a risk here that unqualified leads will start booking meetings and end up wasting even more of a sales rep’s time by not being the right fit, or by turning into no-shows.
That’s why it’s best to implement this strictly on the website pages visited by the highest intent traffic, pages that have a history of generating quality leads.
By adding a direct booking option to your best landing pages, you’ll make it frictionless for your highest quality leads to book a meeting and save a ton of time on follow-ups.
Scheduling software like YouCanBook.me makes this very easy to do. It’s as simple as copying the booking widget code and pasting it onto the target landing page. The bookings resulting from this widget will then appear directly into your calendar.
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BONUS Tip: Anticipate last-minute appointmentsA company’s sales and marketing channels are like a machine that never stops working. Leads and bookings continuously flow in, no matter the day or time.
This can be disruptive to a salesperson’s schedule and make it difficult for them to predict and manage their workload.
A good way to prevent unexpected meetings in the nick of time is to set a certain limit to how far in advance a prospect can book a meeting.
For example, you could set it up in your appointment booking software that meetings can be booked at a minimum of 4 hours in advance.
This will help your salespeople better manage their responsibilities, and also give them enough time to prepare for their prospect meetings.
All of the above tips can be easily implemented using scheduling software.
Setting up any software has a cost, but the amount of time it will save your sales reps and the number of new deals you’ll be able to close as a result will be far worth it.
YouCanBook.me is an online appointment tool that saves you time and hassle by automating your scheduling. Test it out for free for 14 days and see the impact it has on your sales team’s productivity, efficiency, and targets.
Written by
Cristian is a growth marketer for QuickMail, a tool that helps connect businesses through cold outreach. He enjoys writing about sales, cold email, and growth hacks. When he's not dreaming up his next growth power move, you can find him playing in the backyard with his french bulldog Olivia.
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