Meetings are the fuel that your sales team uses to engage with and deliver value to your customers. It’s through these meetings that you’re able to gain a better understanding of your buyers’ needs, align your product or solution to their business challenges and build stronger relationships with your buyers.
Research indicates that more sales meetings increase the probability of a closed-won opportunity. While this might seem obvious, a successful series of meetings represent that your buyers are engaged with you, and are showing a willingness to learn more. What’s incumbent upon sellers is ensuring that they’re providing value in these meetings. With Forrester reporting that buyers rate only 1 in 8 meetings as providing value (a seller demonstrating a solid understanding of the prospect’s business issues and articulating how they address them), there is definitely room for improvement.
We’re excited to be supporting the needs of sales teams with a series of improvements to our Meetings capabilities. Since releasing our Meetings capabilities back in February of this year, prospects and customers have been able to directly book over 7000 meetings on sellers’ calendars using the new meeting scheduling functionality. Combined with our forthcoming conversation intelligence capabilities, sales teams will be able to better understand, improve and optimize the value that sales meetings contribute to their revenue goals.
The new Meetings enhancements include:
Adding Buffer Times
No one likes to be hurried off at the end of a meeting, especially if the conversation is going well. Similarly, showing up late or unprepared to a sales meeting is a surefire way to set the wrong tone with your buyers. We now help avoid those awkward back-to-back meetings or meetings running over by adding buffer times. When integrating with Gmail Calendar (gCal) and Outlook calendars, users can now elect to automatically add buffer times between their meetings. Time options available to prospects to schedule meetings will be dynamically updated to include the appropriate buffer times and ensure that your team has full control over their day.
Minimum Scheduling Notice
Providing your buyers with the best sales experience possible involves understanding your buyers’ needs and preparing appropriately for your meetings together. We’ve added controls for customers to specify a period of time that a meeting can’t be booked within – preventing last-minute meetings being added to a salesperson’s calendar.
Limit Future Availability
Creating a sense of urgency in the sales cycle is crucial to maintaining deal momentum and maximizing your sales cycle velocity. Having a seller book a calendar meeting 6 months from now might be beneficial in some situations, but won’t help in the short-term. By limiting your future availability, customers can now control how far into the future their calendars show available for, ensuring that meetings get booked and momentum is maintained.
We are grateful to have you here with us on this journey, and we hope you feel the #saleslove with this announcement. We are always excited to hear your feedback, so if you have any questions please check out the Knowledge Base, or contact [email protected].