Cindy:
Hi, everybody. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. How are you doing? I’m here with Jillian Littlejohn. Hi. Hi. Glad you’re all here. Are we showing up on Facebook yet? Is it there?
Jillian:
I can see it.
Cindy:
That’s so good. There we are. Hi, everybody. Welcome. Welcome. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. I’m here with Jillian Littlejohn, and we’re just going to do a little 20-minute session on calendar scheduling and how to make it easy for your perfect client, for your perfect customer, for your prospects to book a meeting with you.
Cindy:
Hi, Jillian. How are you doing?
Jillian:
Hi, I’m good. Thanks. How are you?
Cindy:
I’m so good. Yay.
Cindy:
Well, so Jillian, when you and I were talking last week, one of the things you said to me just jumped out so, so much. You said that you’d worked with over 250 companies in the last year, and that their top call to action-
Jillian:
The last three years.
Cindy:
… the last few years? It was a lot. And so you were telling me what top call to action was for most businesses, and can I throw that back to you?
Jillian:
For sure.
Cindy:
Do you remember us talking about that?
Jillian:
So whenever we’re working with service-based businesses which, in CRM, a lot of those higher touchpoint, larger ticket items, you generally need to have a conversation first, almost always, regardless of what that service is, what that higher ticket product is. Sometimes, you need to have a conversation with the decision-makers, with the person who has the problem and you have the solution for it.
Jillian:
So whether that’s a demo, an estimate, initial consultation, discovery call, whatever, a coffee date, whatever that is, that is the entryway into a conversation to start developing that relationship with your ideal prospect.
Jillian:
So I think every business really needs to think about making it as easy as possible to streamline and get in that front door and starting that relationship.
Cindy:
I love that. I love how you said that streamline and get in the front door. And for those of you who are on Zoom with us, just give us a comment in the chat. And for those of you who are on Facebook with us, just give us a comment in the chat and just would love to know who is already using a calendar booking system, yes, who’s always wanted to, but never did it or some other answer, just to give a little indication. And if you’re watching this on the replay, let us know in there too, and we’ll circle back with you as well.
Cindy:
So Jillian, for people who are doing appointment booking or calendar booking systems, it’s great, and then there’s the rest of us, so the rest of the people out there who are like, “I’ve always wanted one. I’ve booked something like that on somebody else’s system, but I never set that up for myself. I’ve always wanted to.” We’re here to help you take that step and make it happen.
Cindy:
Jillian, a question I wanted to ask is how do you choose… there’s free choices out there. There’s some that cost money. How do you choose the right one for your business?
Jillian:
Definitely. And I think at this point, everyone should have at least booked one appointment virtually. It’s March 2021. You’ve at least clicked this link and set it up, and you know that it’s good. So you probably have one. If you don’t, that’s totally fine too. And it’s easy to get started. There are a lot of free ones. There’s a ton on the market. There’s new ones every day, every week. I keep hearing about just new advancements with those.
Jillian:
And there’s definitely the tried-and-true staples that are easy to get started with like Calendly or Acuity, or there’s even some that are built into your website builder or your CRM.
Jillian:
So there is a lot of things to consider as far as a price point, as the features, making sure that it’s appropriate for your appointment type. If it doesn’t integrate with the virtual meeting software that you’re using, that might not be one that you need, or if they can invite multiple people, or there’s just so many different settings you can consider when kind of shopping around.
Jillian:
And one thing that I think would be really important as well is to make sure that it will integrate with your existing systems. So whenever you book an appointment, make sure that it shows up in the same calendar where all of your existing appointments are. Making sure that it connects to your CRM if you have one, just so that way you can track that activity. And considering your team size, if you need multiple seats because you have multiple sales reps, that can get pricey with some of these tools. So really thinking about your needs on a deeper basis.
Jillian:
If, of course, anyone wants to talk about that further, feel free to book a call with me, but it’s really unique to you and what’s appropriate, but a good consideration to have.
Cindy:
So one that I use a lot is ScheduleOnce. And that’s just one that I like. So Fallon just, if you don’t mind, throw my calendar booking appointment link in the chat, if for nothing else, you guys can just click it and see the experience, and we’ll do yours as well, Jillian, and there’s tons out there. It doesn’t matter which one you use, in a way, just as long as, like you said, Jillian, you get the functionality you want.
Cindy:
I like ScheduleOnce just because it makes it easy for people to book. I get a notification when they book. I think the price is, not actually sure, around $10 a month, so it’s not super expensive. And it also integrates, for me, with Google Calendar, so it just shows up on there which is really good. So I kind of love that. And it sends SMS messages, so it’ll send a message reminder. So those are important to me.
Cindy:
But Jillian, I think you use Calendly or which one are you using a lot of?
Jillian:
I use Calendly. I thought ScheduleOnce might be more pricey, but I don’t know. I haven’t looked at it in a while, but they do have some cool features where you can have different pages for different types of booking links, and that’s really cool.
Jillian:
Calendly seems to serve all of the needs that I have. It starts at a free basis and then it’s also, I think, $10 a month, so it’s approachable, and it integrates well with Zapier to pretty much everything.
Jillian:
The SMS is just built-in there. They literally could just book the appointment, type in their phone number, and say “Yes, I want an SMS reminder.” And so it’s really easy to set that up without needing Twilio or all the integrations.
Jillian:
And so that’s why I like Calendly. You can embed it on your website. There’s so many easier and approachable features to get set up. You can even accept payments on appointment booking.
Cindy:
I want to hear about that. Can you tell us about payments? I think that’s super interesting. And if you guys have questions about payments or anything around the calendar stuff, just throw it in the chat, and we’ll come back to it. But I want to hear about payments.
Jillian:
So often, you might book an appointment with someone that isn’t a paid appointment, and that process can sometimes get a little bit clunky, and it could dissuade those prospective customers away from you because there’s just so many hoops they need to jump through to actually work with you. So it could be that you send over an invoice after the fact or other additional work, whereas with building it right into your calendar booking system, they can’t reserve that time in your calendar until they paid. So it accepts payment right there.
Jillian:
And Calendly is one tool that does that as well as many of the others. You can integrate it with Stripe or whatever your merchant is, and it makes it super easy. Bing, bang, boom, you’re paid, and they are in your calendar. So you’ve got a customer, maybe even one that you talked to previously that just came back and found the link and booked it, and it’s just a paid customer showing up in your calendar.
Jillian:
So that’s a really exciting feeling to see that and not feel like anyone has any follow-up or additional homework to do for that appointment to happen.
Cindy:
I love that. And then just Camille just came back to us and said AppointmentCore is the one that she loves, and it also has SMS and reminders and integrates natively with Keap which is the marketing automation software that a lot of us use.
Cindy:
And so, yay. Keep those comments coming, keep those comments coming.
Cindy:
We actually have a course, the Seven Marketing Basics course, and one of the modules in is all about appointment booking, so getting people to do a trial or getting people to have that meeting with you. So that’s a course that we offer and kind of get into some of these things.
Cindy:
So a lot of questions I hear, and you probably hear this too, Jillian, is when you’re thinking about appointment booking systems or calendar booking software is how can I get it to sync to my calendar and how does that really work? And I wondered if you’d speak to that?
Jillian:
For sure. So a lot of these platforms, primarily they’ll integrate with either Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar, depending on the software that you’re using for your calendar and that can automatically post appointments to them.
Jillian:
So often, it’s a pretty simple setup. You’ll choose the software that you’re using for your calendar. You’ll click Connect. You’ll authorize that they’re checking availability in that calendar as well as posting appointments to it and making sure that it’s going to the right calendar as well if you’ve got several different ones associated with your account, and that just makes it super simple. You’ve got one place you’re looking at, a source of truth for what you have to do that day. And it’s so important because maybe you want to block off the afternoon for picking up the kids at soccer or whatever that is. You don’t want a surprise meeting showing up there.
Jillian:
So definitely integrate with your calendar.
Cindy:
And a lot of email or a lot of the systems send out email reminders and that kind of thing. How often do you set yours up to send out reminders, and how many? What’s a kind of good rule of thumb on that if there is one?
Jillian:
I find pretty consistently across the board, it’s the initial confirmation, letting them know, “Yes, we have your appointment. It’s in the calendar. Make sure it’s in your calendar as well. Here are the important steps or things you need to do in preparation.” And then probably the day before, and depending on if it’s in person or virtual, you might send the link an hour before on the day of or maybe a few hours before on the day of with maybe some driving instructions or parking directions, or, “We’ll meet you at the door” or, “Come through the back entrance.” Whatever that is that they need to know, you can actually include that right in there.
Jillian:
And it can be personal for that customer as well, depending on if you’re using a CRM and segmenting and personalizing there. You can really make it a special experience for them with those reminders.
Jillian:
And then now, more so, people are also adding in that text message element we mentioned as well, so maybe a simple text the day of is also great.
Cindy:
And this type of system is great for both virtual trade shows and in-person trade shows. So I just wanted to speak to trade shows for a second because Fallon and I have been working at the HPA Show this week with somebody and we did some calendar bookings and stuff there. And a show that I was at, and this was in person, so a little while back, we did this type of thing. And like you said, the reminders then… I actually had a picture of the meeting spot that people could come to in the reminder.
Jillian:
Nice.
Cindy:
So it’s like, “I’m going to be here.” And I had me at the table sitting there because it was a huge convention center. It’s the Las Vegas Convention Center. And it was hard to find this particular meeting room a little bit. And so I had a couple shots in there, “Go down this hallway to N103 and take a left” and could put that in there. And so it was really nice that I could kind of update that on the fly once I got to the event, and those kinds of reminders really personalize it and make it so, so nice.
Jillian:
That’s brilliant. Establish that rapport in advance. They kind of have a familiar face that they’re looking for. So that’s so great. I love that.
Cindy:
It was really fun. I was at this trade show and any of the new exhibitors who wanted to meet in person, the trade show itself had hired me to meet with any new exhibitors and go over their top marketing challenge. So we had this meeting room set up, and we’re able to meet there, which is actually really fun to just meet people and be of service and help them.
Cindy:
So the calendar booking system made that even happen. If I didn’t have that, it wouldn’t have even happened so…
Jillian:
No one would have showed up. They wouldn’t know where to find you. They wouldn’t have known. That’s amazing.
Cindy:
And one of the things I did in there is ask, “What’s your top marketing challenge,” and I know you work a lot with qualifying questions and those types of things, and I wanted to ask about that.
Jillian:
So I mean this is where you get to that problem where maybe you have too many leads or that people are finding you, but they might not be your ideal fit client. So that’s where sometimes, you might not want to have your calendar openly available. You might want to have some kind of qualifying questionnaire about their current needs or situation or their pain points showing that you’re listening to what they’re interested in, but, of course, still somewhat automated. They could fill out this questionnaire talking about their project or their pain point or their business size or whatever those things that dictate what your ideal client is.
Jillian:
And from that, be generated with the appropriate followup. So that appropriate follow-up might be a different type of appointment or maybe a resource that you have about that or saying that this is a product or a service that you’re coming up with in the future or refer them to another business. Whatever that is appropriate for you and your customer base, you can really just kind of automate and streamline and make sure everyone gets the information that they need and that only those qualified clients are getting into your calendar.
Cindy:
I love that. That’s a great way to think about qualifying and making sure that your calendar booking is sort of set up for those perfectly qualified people.
Cindy:
So do you use this kind of thing in your day to day life?
Jillian:
I do. Right now, I’ve got basically one entry point. We’ve got an initial consultation easily available on my calendar or on my website everywhere. And from that conversation, I’m able to direct them to the right relationship.
Jillian:
But yeah, and I find that in just meeting and networking with people right now is huge because we can’t meet as often face to face. And even when I did meet people face to face, we would still put it in our calendars, “We’ve got a coffee date coming up. I’m blocking it off. I’m not going to open other appointments.” I really do just live by my calendar. So to have a link that makes it easily and accessible to book into it.
Jillian:
Even sometimes with friends, I mean, really all of my calendar is dictated by either being booked or just recurring events and things.
Cindy:
I like it. And so anybody live with us now or watching the replay, if you have any questions about calendar booking systems, you can jump on a quick free call with Jillian. Just easy chat with her, no-obligation kind of thing. And so her calendar-booking… well, go ahead. Tell us your calendar booking link.
Jillian:
If you visit spark.click/start, that will bring you to my calendar or opting in just to start a conversation with me.
Cindy:
Yay. And we put that in the chat, too, so you guys have that as well. And mine is cindyzeulsdorf.com, so that’s really long, so we’ll put that in the chat as well.
Cindy:
But that’s a good way. And also, just clicking those to kind of see the experience, and when you’re choosing your own system, you can kind of go, “I like this. I don’t need this part, whatever.” It gives you kind of a chance to view what’s working.
Cindy:
I’m just going to jump onto Facebook here and see what questions came up, and Fallon, you’re checking out and Zoom chat as well. Barbara, thank you, Barbara. Calendar is essential automation. That’s true. Yay. Love that.
Cindy:
So if you guys have any questions… what calendar systems are everybody using out there right now? We use Google at Kokoro Marketing for all of our team and everybody like that, but just let us know in the chat.
Cindy:
And what do you use, Jillian, for your actual calendar?
Jillian:
I like Google the best, but I also now have an Outlook one as well, so I’m kind of straddling between the two. My preference is G Suite, generally. But it’s preference.
Cindy:
And a lot of our business-to-business, B2B folks use Outlook, so that ends up being the sort of default, the go-to, I think, for a lot of B2B-type clients.
Cindy:
And we’ve got Camille saying she’s Google, so that’s great. Thank you. Thank you.
Cindy:
What other things, Jillian? If somebody who just didn’t have a system set up at all, and you’re going to just give them one or two things, “Just do this first or just do this first.” What would you sort of say to them to get started?
Jillian:
Well, often, this is the first step that I will recommend. When we’re talking about Seven Marketing Basics, if you don’t have an easy way for someone to get into your funnel to start that relationship, that’s step one. That’s the beginning of that customer journey. You need to get them into your calendar. And so definitely having that call to action on your website, or if you don’t have a website yet, on your social media, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, so people know how they can talk with you more and learn more about what you do and how that could be a mutually beneficial relationship.
Jillian:
So having that as a call to action, maybe in the top right corner of your website, having on the Contact Us page, embedding your calendar right in there. The fewer barrier points of entry, the better, although I’ve recently come across one that’s just a little too slick that you don’t even need to like fill in your information or anything. I think it just… I tapped the button, and it booked an appointment, and I had to reschedule. It was really cool, but it was just way too fast for me or just… it was really fast. I think that one was built into a CRM I was looking at, but just making it as easy as possible to get them in your calendar. Don’t make them jump through hoops and with the rest of your customer life cycle as well, it’s really, really important to get that set up as soon as you can.
Cindy:
It can be so easy. And for anybody who needs to talk to their prospect before they make a sale, whether it’s equipment sales, consulting, real estate, I don’t know, anything. If you need to talk to your people before a sale is going to happen, you’ve got to have a calendar booking system in place, right, because that’s going to move your sales-forward and just make it easier for everybody to get to you and to work together.
Cindy:
So if you’re doing any kind of sales where you need to talk to somebody before… now, if you’re doing something where you just never talk to anybody, it’s just digital sales, and you never talk to them that’s maybe a different thing. I don’t know. But really, for me and for everything I do and for the people we work with, they’re having a conversation. There’s a consultative piece in it. Yes, some of the stuff’s automated and yes, there’s info on the website, but eventually, someone’s going to want to talk to you. And so, got to have that system in place. Nice.
Jillian:
You definitely have to be able to be there to listen to your prospects, hear what they need, and direct them appropriately. Maybe they’re shy… even if it’s a higher-ticket item that they’re shopping for online that they could purchase without talking to anyone, they like to have that option to be like, “Is this the right thing for me? Are there better deals, or is this a better package?”
Jillian:
So being open and available to talk to your audience and your prospects and your ideal customers is huge and needs to be everywhere.
Cindy:
Yay, so good.
Cindy:
All right. So if you’re trying to decide what system to choose for your business, you can think about the speed of the booking, the availability that you have on your calendar, how you’re going to get people, how you’re going to drive people to that link, SMS reminders, email reminders, and qualifying questions and payment. So those are things to think about. And we’ll just leave you with that.
Cindy:
If you have any questions, jump on a call with Jillian. Jump on a call with me. Just a free chat, always happy to do it. And I think we’ll call it a day. Talk later.
Jillian:
Great. Thank you.
Cindy:
All right. Bye, everybody.
