From Your Website to a Sales Meeting in 60 Seconds or Less

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1 Five proven ways to shorten the distance from your website to conversation with online appointment scheduling

2 Overcoming the Daunting Sales and Marketing Realities Meetings with prospective customers fuel the marketing and sales machine. But getting on a prospect s calendar is no easy task. It can take weeks to make it happen; many times, it doesn t happen at all. Either way, the challenge of getting on your prospect s calendar often stalls your sales process. Calendar Invite Battleship The results? You know them well. Salespeople spend more time chasing prospects and less time talking to them. Sales cycles are longer. Marketing conversion rates are lower. How can you overcome these challenges and get quality leads through the funnel faster, increase your sales team s efficiency, and meet your revenue goals? Embedding a Click-to-Schedule link or button transforms your website into a sophisticated engagement engine, enabling self-service scheduling for website visitors, increasing confirmed appointments, and accelerating the flow of leads through the sales funnel. The bottom line? You can dramatically increase the number of your sales engagements and shorten the distance from your website to a meaningful conversation with your prospect or customer. Trying to book an appointment between two busy people over is like playing Calendar Invite Battleship. Hoping to blindly hit one of the few open time slots in each other s schedules is a massive waste of time on both ends. Not fun either! Justin Shepard, Sales Development, ByAllAccounts 1

3 How does it work? A quick introduction to web-based appointment scheduling When you include a click to schedule button on your website, prospects can view available meeting times of the most suitable rep and immediately schedule a convenient time for a call or demo. Smart-Routing technology streamlines and accelerates the sales process by replacing traditional Contact Us forms with the opportunity for a hot prospect to immediately reserve a time on a the calendar of the appropriate representative, determined by assignment rules unique to your business. confirmations of the mutually agreed meeting time are automatically scheduled and the appointments are added to the personal calendar of the representative whether they use Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, ical, Lotus Notes, Zimbra or Salesforce.com calendars. The website visitor is also provided with the option to add the appointment to their own calendar. Outlook ical 2

4 5 best practices for using your website to get on your customer s calendar today Best Practices at a Glance 1. Zero-in on the hot prospects. 2. Place your Click-to-Schedule offer in your visitor s conversion path. 3. Make it easy to say Yes! 4. Get your website to generate sales meetings even when the office is closed. 5. Test, test, test. 3

5 1. Zero-in on the hot prospects Actions speak louder than words. When a prospect clicks on a Click-to-Schedule link on your website, it means they are ready to talk business. This is the kind of signal your salespeople are looking for to bump the prospect up on their follow-up list. Even when you use the traditional contact us or collateral download forms, there is still an opportunity to take this initial interest to the next step by offering a one-on-one meeting. Real-Life Testimonial TimeTrade facilitates a new purposeful way for us to talk to people when it is convenient for them. Perry Allison VP of Marketing Bidding for Good To maximize conversion rates, create auto-response templates that are sent when a lead registers on the website. Including a Click-to-Schedule call to action in these auto-response s is the quickest way to transform these leads into qualified opportunities. 4

6 2. Place your Click-to-Schedule offer in your visitor s conversion path. How to optimally place your Click-to-Schedule buttons is probably one of the key questions you ll need to figure out. While the options are nearly endless, the overriding consideration is that you don t want your visitors to have to go out of their way to find your Click-to-Schedule offer. For example, most website analyses show that only a small percentage of visitors typically scroll down the page, so keeping your offer above the fold is paramount to ensure visibility. To maximize conversion, try placing Click-to-Schedule buttons along the path you would expect a qualified visitor to take. The Homepage, Product/Services pages, and the Contact Us page are some of the primary locations you may consider. Conversely, pages that are oriented towards top of funnel visitors (e.g., Company, News, Resources pages) would probably not be appropriate for a Click-to-Schedule call to action. Some of the common placements are shown over the next pages. 5

7 Click-to-Schedule on a homepage 6

8 Click-to-Schedule in a web page header 7

9 Click-to-Schedule on a product/service page 8

10 Click-to-Schedule on a contact page 9

11 Click-to-Schedule in interactive video 10

12 Best Practices in Action Click-to-Schedule Doubles a Sales Rep s Productivity at ByAllAccounts ByAllAccounts innovative software enables financial advisors to better serve their high net-worth clients by aggregating data from disparate accounts into a single webbased interface. Wealth management is based on trust, says Cynthia Stephens, VP of Marketing at ByAllAccounts. To win the trust of prospects, we go above and beyond to talk with our customers to better understand their needs. Unfortunately, getting customers on these sales calls was a time-consuming process for the salespeople. Justin Shepard, Sales Development Rep, describes trying to book an appointment between two busy people over as Calendar Invite Battleship : Sending and declining time proposals through back-and-forth s, hoping to blindly hit one of the few open time slots in each other s schedules, is a massive waste of time on both ends. Not fun either! Real-Life Testimonial I strongly recommend TimeTrade. By improving our marketing & sales efficiency and effectiveness, it s given us a strong competitive edge. Cynthia Stephens VP of Marketing ByAllAccounts After choosing TimeTrade, ByAllAccounts integrated its capability for prospects to self-schedule appointments with its Reps in a variety of ways. Visitors to the company s website now see an invitation link to Schedule a Call prominently displayed at the top of each and every page. Clicking on that link takes prospects to a landing page, where after filling in some basic information---they can choose a convenient time to speak with a company rep. The results? Now when prospects self-schedule an appointment with me, I m fulfilling a request to meet on their terms. I m creating twice the number of opportunities per day than I did before, says Shepard. 11

13 3. Make it easy to say Yes! A Click-to-Schedule button on your website makes it easy for your website visitor to take the next step towards a one-on-one conversation, quickly bypassing the annoying and time-consuming steps of calling or filling out a form. Instead of spending time trading and phone messages, they can instantaneously find a mutually convenient time to speak with the right person in your organization. Since it s all about making it super easy for the customer to say yes to a meeting, be mindful of how busy they are. You may want to experiment with different meeting durations, but a 15-minute introductory call seems to be the magic formula that many find to yield the best response rates. 15 minutes seems to be the magic number many companies find to yield the best response for an introductory call. 4. Get your website to generate sales meetings when the office is closed Not only does online scheduling work to create sales meeting during the day, it can also do the work for you while you are out of the office. Having a Click-to-Schedule button on your Contact Us page provides your web visitors a way to schedule a meeting with the appropriate person on your team even in the middle of the night or on a holiday. Seeing new meetings the next morning already scheduled in their calendar will sure get your salespeople start their day with a smile! To make things even easier for your salespeople, integrate Click to Schedule with your corporate calendar and CRM systems to ensure meetings and tasks are automatically populated. 12

14 5. Test, test, test. Click-to-Schedule is a versatile tool in your arsenal. We have assembled some of the best practices that other organizations successfully used on their websites to capture highly qualified leads and shorten the sales cycles. As you begin to use online appointment scheduling, you might find that what works best for you with your customers is different from what we have seen so far. To make the most out of online scheduling on your website, keep experimenting, measuring results, and optimizing the way you use it. The Top Test List Placement pages On-page placement Button vs. link Wording on button/link Meeting duration 13

15 About TimeTrade Enterprise-Class Online Appointment Scheduling TimeTrade is the world leader in online appointment scheduling systems used by businesses to create new customers, accelerate the sales and service process and make it easy and fast to respond to customers 24/7. Our scheduling software solutions are built on the flexible TimeTrade Appointment Cloud SaaS platform that has the power to scale up to meet the real-time scheduling demands of the largest deployments. Appointments are critical to any business and having the time for face-to-face or phone-based interactions is a must in order to maximize customer satisfaction and accelerate the sales process. TimeTrade s appointment scheduling solutions are perfect for sales prospecting, web-based lead generation, post-sales support, marketing effectiveness, and streamlined customer service delivery. They provide the capability for B2B and B2C businesses to spend more time with customers and prospects by eliminating the time-consuming process of creating, coordinating and confirming appointments. To learn more about TimeTrade, visit or click the button below to schedule a 15-minute introductory call. Click-to-Schedule is not just for your website! To learn how Click-to-Schedule can be best used to increase your conversion read our next ebook FROM TO A SALES MEETING IN 60 SECONDS OR LESS Get it here Have a best practice to share? it to: bestpractices@timetrade.com 14