Today’s GSDdaily is episode 152 and we’re going to talk about how to automate incoming sales calls. We’ve worked with a lot of different kinds of businesses over the years and one of the questions that we get asked most often really is how do we get great clients coming into our website, coming into our world and raising their hand and saying, “Yes, I want more information about your products, your services, whatever.”
Schedule Calls by Group
One of the ways that we do it in addition to the sales funnel, we’ll build a specific kind of sales funnel that gets them scheduling incoming sales calls on our calendar. Now everybody’s offer is different. If it’s over a thousand dollars, then typically a sales call is required. Especially if you don’t have a really great audience or a really great relationship with your audience. If it’s below a thousand dollars then you can typically sell through an order form, but where the incoming sales calls scheduling thing comes in is in those higher ticket offers.
So, if they come from, let’s say Facebook and they land on your website, they watch a little bit of a video and then there’s usually an application or something below this video. It might be a form. It might be a chatbot. It might be a Facebook messenger bot or something like that. But there’s usually a way, some medium that they interact with, which asks them a couple of questions. We talked about this yesterday. First name, last name business, ask them a couple of questions. And then the magic happens when they hit the submit button. So, if they fill out the questionnaire, they fill out the survey, the application, the way that you want them to, then they move to a scheduling link. Now, the scheduling software… There are so many different ways to do it and to be quite honest, I am very picky about when to send a scheduling link and when not to.
I think it’s kind of a bad move to send a scheduling link to certain prospects, to certain clients when really you should just have a conversation and talk it out. You should just figure out like, “Okay, I have an availability Thursday afternoon, pick a time.” That’s not so hard and some people respect that. Sometimes the impersonal send a link to book a time on my calendar, it aggravates me and it aggravates other people that I’ve talked to. The more high-level I guess, people who value time, oddly enough, don’t like the calendar link. They feel it’s too impersonal.
Scheduling Software
Acuity Scheduling
However, where calendar links work really, really well is inside the sales funnel. Because people are in process, they’re in flow, they’re in-state, they’re going through your sales funnel. They clicked an ad. They’re watching a video. They fill out a form. The next thing that you want them to do is you want to book a time on your calendar or your sales team’s calendar. So, in that instance, it works really well. And there are some sales calendar tools that we have used very successfully. One of the ones that we send our clients to is Acuity Scheduling. Acuity Scheduling is nice, robust software, but it allows what is called pooled availability.
So, if you have a sales team of two, three, four people, then what it does is it kind of collects all of their calendars and then gives your prospect one calendar to book a time in. And then it assigns the person who is going to be responsible for that call. So, you can have some people to fill up a lot of time slots in the calendar. And it has worked out pretty nicely in teams of two, three, four sales reps. So, you can have blanket coverage of the week, or of the working hours, or even of the entire day. And people can book calls wherever it suits them. So, that’s an Acuity Scheduling.
Calendly
Another one, kind of the default one that people use is Calendly. Calendly, nice, simple software. If you have a one-person shop and you want to just send out a calendar booking link, Calendly is going to work pretty well for that. It’s nice.
Time Slots
What we use in the process, we’ve even built one called Time Slots, which is being updated and added into the access marketplace.
Drift
The one that we’re using right now that we really like is Drift. Drift is actually chatting bot software or conversational marketing software. It is what powers the chatbox that is on doneforyou.com and some of our other websites. They have a scheduling functionality that you can actually just grab a link. So, you can send people directly to a call scheduling tab inside the chat, or then you have a link that you can send people like an email and stuff. And it has worked out really well for us too. There are some caveats to it. It’s not quite as full-featured as an Acuity Scheduling, but you have it in, you can make use of the calendaring widget inside of a chatbot, which is super cool. So if somebody says, “I want to schedule a time with a human being,” they click the button, schedule pops up and they can book a time in their calendar right there. And then it’s a metric that is actually reportable inside Drift. So, that’s pretty cool too.
Those are just some quick ways of engaging your high ticket prospects in some sort of a calendaring scheduling application while they’re still in process. If there’s anything you would like us to look over, or if you need any help go to doneforyou.com and we’ll get you taken care of.
