There are many ways to invest your businesses’ resources (such as time and money). In this article let’s focus on the time you can save on the back and forth of setting a call with a potential customer through a scheduling tool.
I’ve met lots of coaches and service providers that still take emails from their website visitors or they still ask for a phone call. In the beginning phone calls look good because knowing that you get phone calls and people are interested in what you have to offer can’t be bad. But later you’ll notice that it might get quite distracting. That is still true even if you have a dedicated salesperson. You’d want them as efficient and focused as possible.
You might be doing something and suddenly the phone rings or there’s an email with a question from a website visitor. This means you need to leave whatever you were doing and answer. Even if you don’t respond right away, it will stay there bugging your mind to get it done.
But the cost of this is not just the time you spend answering (10-15 min). Usually, it’s the time you need to get back in the state of focus (for me it’s at least 20 to 30 min) that is the most valuable.
Benefits of a scheduling tool for service providers
Wouldn’t it be better to know beforehand when you meet with a potential customer? Now compare the two scenarios:
- You wake up in the morning to just look at your calendar and know exactly who and when you meet (online or in-person). You also know details about them and their business as well as what are their concerns and challenges. As a result, you can get on a call totally prepared.
- You are constantly stressed out that you need to answer that phone at any moment. You get irritated by the sound of your ringtone.
If you’ve been a service provider for some time you know how frustrating it can get when you can’t focus on anything due to various distractions like unplanned calls and other urgent tasks. If not, you’ll most probably get there.
I’d go with the first scenario every-time, although it would need a bit of planning for the buyer’s journey beforehand. And let’s not forget the tech set-up to make it seamlessly integrate with your CRM, calendar, email, etc. If you can automate something then you almost certainly should. But we’ll get to that later in the article.
Besides increasing your productivity, you’ll be able to also increase the percentage of your sales conversion rate using a qualification form. This will need to be tied to the scheduling tool and it should collect important details about the prospect.
These details will help you decide if the prospect seems like a good fit or should you disqualify without even speaking to them. The result is a win-win for you and the prospect.
Scheduling tools – a small list of options
When it comes to choosing a tool the options seem limitless but it always depends on the specifics of your buyer’s journey and what you want to accomplish.
Because we’re talking about booking calls with potential customers I’ll leave a small list of tools that you might want to research more. Or you can use my recommendation which I’ll write in the last section of the article.
Automate to save time, money and get the peace of mind you deserve
Whenever I have something to do I first look at how can it be automated and how long will it take. Most of the time there’s a way to remove repetitive and pointless work and replace it with an automated process. It’s also the case with the scheduling tool integration with the rest of the marketing and sales tools.
After testing different software solutions, we now use WordPress with Calendly and Active Campaign. All automated and integrated via Zapier.
Want to see how easy it is to book a call with me? Go ahead and book a free strategy session to check for yourself how the automation works. Then in the call, we’ll be talking about how you can benefit from automated scheduling.
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