TSE 1147: Why I Love Calendly

The Sales Evangelist team understands the challenges in coordinating calendars and that’s why I love Calendly. This tool is perfect for ensuring that your schedules are well planned and plotted.  Calendly for selling  Calendly is a great tool that we’ve been using for years. The calendar dance is a common routine among sales reps who go back and forth with prospects, and partners trying to set a meeting. When their schedules don’t line up, the task is tricky and challenging at best, so how do you go around it? Calendly is the scheduling app that’s going to make that possible. There are three reasons why I love Calendly and why it’s a great fit for sales reps.  Ad hoc meetings  There’s a difference between being helpful and being lazy. When we deal with prospects who don’t have any intentions of calling, we reach out to them cold. The last thing that you want to do is to give them homework or introduce a possibility of them getting busy and not doing the task with you. It feels a little like imposing a task to your prospects.  Instead of doing this, I recommend that you use the ad hoc meeting embed feature. Gmail integrates to Calendly well, as we mentioned in episode 1142. Scheduling becomes easy when you integrate your Gmail to your Calendly account. You can just click on the little calendar icon next to the send button. A panel opens on the right side and you can click on the time that you are available. You can pick the time you want, put it in your calendar and into your email, copy it, and then paste it into your email.  Your prospect won’t have to leave the mail. They can click that link to see the times that you are available. They can click on one of those times you are free. The time they picked will automatically be put in both of your calendars making everything more efficient. It’s slick and nice. Personalization  The second thing I like about Calendly is the ability to personalize. This feature allows you to create different events or different calendar events for different types of people. For example, I am a sales trainer and a coach who runs an organization. I have several schedules and my coaching times can be designated so that my coaching clients receive a calendar that only reflects my coaching schedule. I have assigned Monday as my podcast recording day. This means that if a podcast guest wants to record, the only time he will see available on the calendar is Monday. My clients can pick any time that I am available on that day. They can’t just pick any day of the week; they can only see the free time I have on Monday.  As a sales rep, you want to schedule your days effectively and you don’t want to keep everything wide open. You can designate appointments in the morning or in the afternoon and put those times in your calendar. These appointment times will be specific for initial appointments or whatever you may want to call them.  Your clients can pick up anytime in your available window and the schedule is then made. This is also helpful when you are looking for a prospect and they can’t talk right then and there but they want to schedule another time. You can pull up your calendar, look up the times that you are available for initial appointments, and you give that slot to your prospect.  But if they want to talk right then and there, then go for it.  Whatever your event may be, you can make specific time slots that you can choose from or your clients can choose from.  The best thing about this is that all these can be integrated into Zoom. When your prospects sign up, they’ll immediately get a Zoom link. They’ll also get a Calendly invite and their appointment will be input to their calendar.  You can also set this up from...