4 Tips On Proper Scheduling That Can Boost Sales & Up Your Marketing Game

The success of a business is hard-fought. If the fight and efforts cease, the business becomes short-lived, no matter how great the product. If you want your brand to be a continuous success, you need to constantly work on it.

For the majority of companies, success means more meetings with customers, decision-makers, and team members. Businesses cannot work properly without internal communication, as well as numerous appointments with potential and existing customers. 

While there isn’t a rule of thumb when it comes to booking more appointments into your schedule, there are some things that you could do to avoid scheduling mistakes, make the process seamless for all sides, and with it, up your marketing game.

Look at your calendar now. Is it almost empty with just a few meetings scheduled in it? Or maybe it has so many meetings, that it’s a mess and impossible to juggle without delays and cancellations? If either of these is your case, you definitely need the tips that we are about to introduce. 

1. Use The Right Set Of Tools For Proper Scheduling

As your business grows, handling all the schedules and meetings can become a real burden – and often an impossible mission. You’ve done a good job in making people interested in your brand, and making investors and other prospects reach out to you. It would be a shame if you lose those prospects because of poor scheduling.

This is why you need a proper set of tools that will automate, facilitate, and optimize the process. Let’s take a look at some must-have options.

Software For In-pp Messaging 

Many of those important meetings in your schedule will be with customers and people in your organization’s circle. To optimize the entire onboarding and communication process for all, you should use different software available in the market. They have an in app messaging guide to help you learn how automated messages form a direct line of communication between you and the customer. Thanks to such tools, you’ll be able to get the information about meetings and news to customers in real-time, therefore minimizing mistakes and delays.

Bookafy To Generate Appointments

Instead of waiting for secretaries to handle every appointment, and making people jump through hoops to get a meeting with you, use Bookafy to generate them automatically. Their guide on how to generate appointments will show you how efficient this can be.

Instead of manually entering the meeting times, sending out reminders, and calling the other party over and over again, you can use this tool to automate it all and make it easily accessible. 

Scheduling software helps reduce the number of scheduled appointments that never happen because people forgot about them. They’ll allow you to follow up and minimize no-shows by reminding all sides of the meeting a few minutes before it occurs. 

2. Make It Simple For Customers To Schedule Meetings

The right set of tools can provide you with reminders and other automated capabilities. But, that only simplified your job – it doesn’t take it altogether. You must make the process of scheduling simpler for the customers.

Let’s start with your company website. You’ve designed it to offer a great user experience and focused on optimizing it for mobile. But have you made it easy for visitors to schedule appointments?

If a person that uses your website wants to connect, you should provide them with a clear CTA that allows them to book a meeting with a representative of your company.

That being said, make sure that you have a button that allows people to book appointments, and place it prominently on different pages on your website. Don’t be vague about it, either. The CTA should clearly say: book your appointment here.

You might even want to consider adding such a CTA to your website’s menu and integrate your scheduling software for better organization.

3. Make More Personalized Calls

Reaching out to customers to book more appointments can be really annoying, especially if your strategy for convincing them doesn’t work very often. While many will tell you to make more calls, we’ll tell you to make more quality calls. In this case, personalization is more important than calling many people and trying to reach them with the same, generic message. 

How do you make excellent personalized calls, then?

For starters, you need to make sure that your calls aren’t repetitive. Yes, you need a script to know what to say and not forget about the most important things. However, reading the script word for word makes sales executives sound unenthusiastic and tired.

Instead of calling and reaching out to just anyone that might be interested, focus on the leads you know can result in actual customers. Spend some time on discovery before making calls. Before you call a person, google them and learn something about who they are as a person.

If, for example, you are looking to schedule meetings for prospective employees, you want to hire the best talent. You’ll give a call to the people that look most promising for the position, but how can you deliver a personalized message to convince them to book a meeting with you?

Check out their LinkedIn profile, gain access to their resume if you can, and even check their social media channels. This will give you a  bit of insight into how to appeal to them personally. Once you are equipped with all this information, you can use it to kickstart an interesting conversation instead of a plain sales pitch.

The more personalized your strategy for outreach is, the more effective it can be. Whether you do it via email, phone, or other channels, personalization is key. If you have some data about the target people you want to reach, you can personalize many of your messages instead of sending similar ones to them all. 

This shouldn’t be all that hard since you are most likely reaching out to people in the same industry or people with similar pain points. Even so, you should put some effort into this to maximize the interest. 

4. Sell Appointments First & Products Later

One of the biggest mistakes is to try and sell the product instead of the appointment. The appointment is the time when you can present the product and impress the person you’re meeting with. If you throw all this information before the meeting actually takes place, they won’t have the reason to set an appointment, would they?

When you reach out to people to convince them to schedule an appointment, provide just some basic information to interest them. Think of this as a trailer for a movie – you introduce some of the main ideas, but no details. Insert some information that prompts them to set an appointment and learn more about what you are offering. 

The idea is to get people excited to meet with you. Only in this way can you convince more of them to schedule a meeting and essentially boost your sales.

Let’s go through some tips that will help you ‘sell the idea of the appointment’.

For starters, go through the process mentioned above. You should perform some research about the person, their problems, their company, etc. Before you present your pitch, make sure to personalize it.

Don’t go around the main topic when trying to land an appointment. Jump at the main point – people won’t wait long for you to tell them why they should schedule an appointment with you. The idea is to be appreciative of their time and let them decide whether or not they want to spend their time meeting with you.

When speaking to them, introduce the friction. Talk to them about their problems and how you can resolve them, as well as why scheduling an appointment with you is a smart idea for them. 

Once you are done telling them why they need to meet with your business and what you can offer them, give them information about the next steps to take. The person that wants to schedule an appointment with you should know exactly how to do this.

At this point, those clear CTAs mentioned above should help a lot, but you also need to provide them with some guidance to make the process easier and more convenient. 

Did You Do All This? It’s Go Time, Then!

Once you complete these four steps, you can expect to get more appointments in your schedule. With the right tool and some organization, you can juggle them all and use them to convert leads into customers, and investors into partners.

The business world is so fast-moving today, that it is almost impossible to keep up without investing some time into planning and scheduling. So, before you jump at the opportunity to meet with people or invest in marketing to accumulate more leads, make sure that you know how to organize the schedule and keep everyone informed of when the next meeting will take place.

Essentially, proper scheduling will boost your sales and improve your marketing strategy, but only if you do it right.