Scheduling
meetings with potential clients can be a great way to grow your business. Given
that most people are now open to a “Skype meeting,” as
opposed to meeting in person for coffee, this alone can expand your small
business far beyond what used to be geographically possible.
However, it can quickly get
confusing once you have appointments coming in from all over the place, and no
way to easily organize them. If you’re a power user of your digital
calendar this goes double — with all those appointments, sorting
them manually can become unsustainable.
Have you ever missed an important
call or meeting because of some problem with your calendar organization? When
this happens it’s easy to immediately start thinking
about all the money you just lost by not attending that meeting.
There’s
an app for that!
Luckily there’s
a plethora of apps to conveniently streamline your appointment booking
experience. Here are three of the best:
ScheduleOnce
ScheduleOnce is the first app most
people bring up when talking about solutions to manage appointment booking.
ScheduleOnce integrates seamlessly with your Google or Outlook calendar,
amongst others, so collaboration is easy.
You can begin customizing things
right away when you sign up for an account. First you’ll want
to link it to your calendar, so it can add bookings automatically. Then you can
specify times and days where you’re either available or unavailable.
You can also add custom, one-off times and dates, for when something comes up.
You can customize the booking page with all sorts of details too, such as
adding mandatory fields for things like the purpose of the call and your
contact’s phone number, so you don’t need to go back and forth via email
to get those details.
Then you receive a custom link
which you can add to your site and send to people, and there are even have
widgets you can have pop-up using Javascript. When someone clicks your link, it
shows the times you’re available in their local time zone.
Even if you’re both halfway around the world, picking a time to talk
that works for both of you couldn’t be easier. The appointment is booked
to both of your calendars, and you can edit the notification settings to make
sure you both remember.
Assistant.to
Assistant.to is a little different
to the other apps here in a couple of ways. First of all it’s
completely free, at least for now. But you would expect that in the future
Assistant.to will become a paid product, or at the very least, include premium
features you need to pay for to utilize.
Assistant.to is far less robust
than ScheduleOnce, but what it does, it does really well. It runs within Gmail,
meaning it’s light and won’t take up system resources. When you’re
sending an email where you want to invite someone to a meeting, just click on
the plugin at the bottom of the new meeting, and select the purpose of your
meeting. Then select the times you’re willing to meet, over several days.
The tool will then create a list of
those times, right in your email to the other person, and they can click on the
time best for them to confirm the meeting. This can work really well if you
only want to offer a few times to meet, instead of giving them full access to
your available times.
TimeBird
TimeBird is in beta development
still, but it should be on your list of apps to watch if you’re
interested in apps in this space. It integrates with your calendar —
and the calendars of those you’re trying to connect with as well.
It then goes through, sees which
times everyone is available for, and suggests the best times in which everyone
is available. This works with just two people, or whole groups of people as
well.
It makes it much easier to book a meeting when your potential client doesn’t have to think about when would be the best time, but instead has one suggested to them. All the more time to dedicate to actual productivity.
No matter which one of these tools you decide to use, gaining a handle on your appointment booking will help you stay better organized, keep your stress levels down, and allow you to walk into every meeting fully prepared.
Dana Lindahl is a writer who specializes in content marketing for startups. His writing helps companies not only reach their customers but also drive sales.