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 your website for clients who want to pay for coaching sessions. 

Team option 

Team option is the newer feature of Calendly. This feature is effective especially for bigger teams with several sales reps. For example, if you want to set-up a meeting with a sales rep of a software company, you don’t have to call or mail them and inquire of their available time. All you need to do is to go to their website and look for the team page and set up an appointment schedule. This team page is connected to Calendly and their Salesforce or CRM. This means that the team’s calendar is connected to the sales reps. 

Whoever has free time on your scheduled appointment date is going to get the notification. This is a round-robin approach so the members cannot cheat the system. This feature saves a lot of headaches especially when assigning which appointment goes to whom. 

You can also set up different events. If you need to set a meeting with your project manager to go over some things with your client, your connected calendars will make it easier for you to see the schedules that both parties are available for a meeting. You can then share the link to your client and have the conversation. 

Simple and efficient 

Calendly is a simple and efficient tool that is blowing the competition out of the water. The TSE team finds this tool very powerful and thus we highly recommend it for you to check and investigate. 

Calendly allows easy scheduling and integration for your prospects and creates less work for you as a seller. #Calendly

It has an ad hoc meeting embedded which makes prospecting and connecting with prospects easier. You can also personalize your calendar according to types and events. Most of all, you can to a round-robin approach with the team option so that no scheduled appointment is wasted. 

“Why I Love Calendly” episode resources

Calendly isn’t paying us for this episode. It’s effective for calendar scheduling, especially for sales reps. It is the perfect tool to help you make the best of your time. 

While we’re at it, check out Kevin Cruise’s book 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time. It’s an amazing book with simple concepts. You can listen to it , digest it, and start applying what you learn in your daily life. This is a helpful book when you are starting out your Calendly experience as well. 

This episode is brought to you in part by TSE Certified Sales Training Program. The program aims to help sales reps and sales teams improve their skills. It is designed to teach you how to find the right customers, the activities and strategies that work, the right questions to ask to build strong value, how to get more people to want to schedule appointments with you, and what you need to do to close powerful deals. 

Go to thesaleevangelist.com/freecourse to check all the 12 modules and get the first two modules for free. The episode is also brought to you by Audible. It’s a good platform for a savvy salesperson like you who wants to learn and grow. Audible has thousands of titles you can choose from. Go to Audible now and do the 30-day free trial and a free book. 

If you find this episode fun and helpful, then we would appreciate your comments and a five-star rating on  Apple podcast. If you’re using other platforms such as Google Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, your ratings there would be valued as well. 

Share this podcast to your friends and colleagues and let’s schedule effectively with Calendly.

Audio provided by Free SFX and Bensound.