It’s funny to consider that we can get driving directions or check the weather in a couple clicks, yet when it comes to scheduling a meeting between two people, we still go back and forth with email after email.
We schedule a lot of sales calls at Cirrus Insight, and our reps started to get really frustrated by all the back and forth by email:
Sales rep: How’s Wednesday in the morning?
Prospect: It’s wide open.
Sales rep: Great, let’s do 9am Pacific.
Prospect: Actually, that won’t work; I’m on the East Coast.
Sales rep: Ok, no problem. How about 8am Pacific?
Prospect: Sounds good.
Sales rep: Excellent; I’ve just sent you a calendar invite.
Prospect: That time just got booked. Can we reschedule for later in the week?
As you can imagine, the back and forth is especially frustrating for the sales reps who are incentivized for booking appointments. We started looking for a way to streamline the process of booking appointments on the calendar and eliminating the gratuitous emails.
We quickly found Assistant.to on the Google Chrome Web Store. It’s a free extension for Chrome that lives in Gmail and allows us to insert availability from a Google Calendar into the body of an email. There are no forms to fill out, no sign ups, etc. Just a simple expandable ribbon in our Gmail compose window where we choose times from our calendar.
The result is that our sales reps send out emails with available dates and times and prospects simply choose what’s most convenient for them. Not only do our reps book more meetings faster, but out prospects are also happier with the process and less likely to abandon the sales process due to frustrating email back and forth.
Meanwhile, we’ve used UberConference for scheduling sales calls for over a year. It fixes all the broken and outdated aspects of traditional conference calling by providing a simple and pain-free way to run sales meetings without the hassle of PIN numbers or downloads. Each of us gets our own dedicated phone numbers and URLs for all of our conference calls, and we can share documents or our screens with the click of a button.
Assistant.to makes it easy for us to schedule UberConference calls with sales prospects and customers right from Gmail. We simply enter an UberConference number into Assistant.to and the recipient of the email invitation can choose one of our available times and click to confirm. The invite includes the Uberconference dial in.
Assistant.to monitors our free/busy availability to prevent double-bookings, and it automatically detects and converts time zones between us and our prospects. And the calendar invites work with any calendar system on any device (e.g. Google Calendar, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, Android, etc.).
At the appointed date and time, the sales rep and the prospect both dial in to the Uberconference number in the calendar invitation. And we can easily switch to Uberconference on the web to show a quick screen share or show a presentation.
The upshot is that our sales reps can schedule more meetings faster with less hassle for them and for our prospects. It’s a win-win-win that helps keep our sales pipeline full.
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