One of these tactics tripled a team’s scheduled demos and doubled their show-up rate.
Admin tasks: they’re the bane of a salesperson’s existence.
Every minute of data entry is a minute stolen from prospecting and working deals. Every email thread back-and-forth to schedule a demo, every pause to send a calendar invite or generate a web conference link, is a barrier between you and your quota.
So to start Q4 strong, we teamed up with Zapier last week to share advanced strategies you can use to free yourself from non-revenue activities and create more time for selling.
Intro to integrating Calendly and Zapier
Zapier passes information between the apps you use automatically — like Calendly, your web conference platform, your CRM, and more — so you can quit worrying about admin tasks and spend time closing.
If you’re totally new to Zapier, our help article will walk you through the basics.
If you missed us live, this recording will cover five ways companies accelerate sales with Calendly + Zapier. One of these tactics actually tripled Ontraport’s scheduled demos and doubled their show-up rate.
Use Calendly and Zapier to:
- Generate a web conference link, then email that link to your prospect
- Log each new meeting with a contact in your CRM
- Add a new contact to your marketing platform, then send a meeting reminder via SMS
- Send a prospect the most relevant drip campaign
- Route all prospect and meeting details to one platform, to reduce time spent clicking through different tabs
Generate a web conference link, then email that link to your prospect
When a prospect or client agrees to meet, do you have to stop what you’re doing, open your web conference tool to create a new meeting, then copy + paste that meeting info in an email back to your prospect?
If so, FunnelExpert’s favorite Zap will save you hours.
Alexandru Alin, FunnelExpert CEO, has set up Zapier to pull data from new Calendly meetings straight into GoToMeeting, where a new meeting is automatically created.
Zapier then pushes that new meeting into a Gmail message and sends it to the prospect.
“I don’t get any complaints from prospects not receiving the link for the meeting on time, or receiving the wrong link,” he said.
Log each new meeting with a prospect or client in your CRM
Keeping your CRM updated is crucial to ensuring different teams are on the same page — but it’s an easy task to forget.
At Mention, Data Operations Manager Thomas Plaindoux uses Zapier to automatically create tasks on Salesforce contacts when a meeting comes through Calendly. This prevents reps from forgetting to log information and improves the team’s awareness overall.
Add someone to your marketing platform, then send a meeting reminder via SMS
If a lead is warm enough to schedule a meeting, leverage that interest: share educational resources with them through your marketing platform, so they have the information they need to make a decision.
With Zapier, Scaled Networks adds new Calendly invitees to Intercom (their marketing platform) automatically, so they can communicate with leads right away. They then move the conversation one step further, using Twilio to send a meeting confirmation via text message.
After that, they use Zapier’s “Delay” option to pause communication until 24 hours before the meeting — when they send the lead a text message reminder to minimize no-shows.
Send a prospect the most relevant drip campaign
It’s unlikely that every prospect is interested in your offering for the same reasons, so why would you send very different people the same generic nurture campaigns?
“We use Calendly and Zapier to make sure that our leads get the right emails based on what stage they’re at,” says Marketing Analyst Brittany Joiner. “A lead who has booked a call with us shouldn’t be nurtured the same way as a lead who hasn’t booked a call.”
To ensure Causely’s marketing and sales efforts are aligned, the team also uses Zapier and Twilio to notify sales reps as soon as they received new meetings through Calendly.
The entire process is then logged in a spreadsheet, so Causely can analyze the data and understand whether marketing and sales goals are being met.
Route all prospect & meeting details to one platform, to reduce time spent clicking through different tabs
When leads request a demo from Ontraport’s website, they’re immediately directed to the sales team’s Calendly page, which has “tripled our number of demos scheduled and doubled our show-up rate,” says CEO Landon Ray.
But to prepare for each meeting, sales reps were still wasting time clicking between different tabs—like their calendars (where meeting details were stored) and Ontraport (where prospect details were stored).
To streamline the meeting prep process, they now use Zapier to route all information straight to Ontraport. This involves two key steps:
- Zapier’s “Filter” option, which ensures the Zap only runs for members of the sales team (vs. other departments using Calendly for different purposes)
- Zapier’s “Formatter” option, which makes data super-easy for reps to read at a glance
Now, reps can instantly see in Ontraport who they’re meeting with, when the meeting occurs, and what they need to prepare.
According to Landon, it’s been a “game changer.”
Zapier’s motto is “If you have to spend time on the same task twice, you should automate it.”
And in sales, every admin task automated is one step closer to quota.
