When B2B customers book appointments and meetings with sales reps, experts and executives, it’s a high-intent signal that indicates pipeline growth or advancement. In short, meeting with your stakeholders is a chance for them to solidify their decision and feel comfortable with the partnership.
However, scheduling meetings and managing appointments is often much harder than it needs to be. With massive deals at stake, there are many challenges that could jeopardize meeting outcomes and hinder your long-term success.
But don’t sound the alarm just yet: There are plenty of ways to overcome obstacles and take the pain out of meeting management. That said, none are as powerful as a robust and feature-rich appointment scheduling software.
In this guide, we’ll analyze all the different types of appointment scheduling apps and gauge their efficiency at an enterprise level. For each, we’ll discuss its impact on B2B marketing and sales processes and whether or not it’s right for an organization like yours.
Intro to appointment scheduling software
We can’t stress enough how important customer meetings are to organizational growth. Consider the variety and volume of meeting types:
- Product demos.
- Expert meetings.
- Sales meetings.
- Executive meetings.
- Dinners.
- Public relations (PR) and analyst relations (AR) meetings.
- Tracks and sessions.
- Roundtables.
- Booth tours.
And that’s only scratching the surface. Although each meeting type serves a different purpose, all are effectively suited to various points in the customer journey. Organizations that book appointments strategically throughout the buying process can nurture prospects down the sales funnel and closer to conversion. Oftentimes, meetings play an important role in accelerating an opportunity.
What does this mean? In short, customer engagements advance pipelines that lead to more revenue.
Why use an appointment scheduling tool?
Organizations are more global than ever before and, therefore, must factor more variables into the process. These include multiple time zones, calendars, target accounts, topics of interest, among several other considerations. Appointment scheduling software can reduce this burden and greatly simplify the effort — both for customers and your stakeholders (sales, executives, experts, PR/AR team, etc.).
As we’ll discuss, manual tools do still play an important part in scheduling meetings. However, they fall well short of the mark in terms of carrying the entire workflow from start to finish. It often takes several emails just to book one meeting. Worse yet, only 38% of emails are ever opened — which means your client communications may be lost into the void.
By contrast, appointment scheduling apps are a much more effective alternative. A robust scheduling app empowers you to:
- Reduce burdensome administrative tasks that hinder your ability to maximize the number of B2B engagements for a marketing program or event.
- Minimize back-and-forth emails between sales, marketing, customers and other participants required to book a meeting.
- Avoid double booking stakeholders, no-shows, time-zone errors, conflicts and cancellations.
- Speed up the customer journey by allowing prospects to directly book meetings at their convenience.
- Collect data that can be used to facilitate quality meetings, improve processes, optimize budgets and maximize productivity.
Spreadsheets for appointment scheduling
Spreadsheets are the Swiss Army knife of the business world. You can use them for almost anything — and in fact, most organizations do. But what about scheduling meetings and managing appointments?
Although spreadsheets aren’t necessarily intended to be a scheduling tool, marketers have leveraged them as such for decades. For starters, they’re certainly a major step up from pen-and-paper processes. Marketing teams often use them to manage and plan all meetings — those booked by themselves, sales reps and others — in relation to a specific program or event.
Spreadsheets are also used to overcome the limitations of traditional calendaring software. Unlike some basic tools, a spreadsheet can be used as a master calendar for tracking and reporting meetings in relation to a trade show or conference. This is especially true for cloud-based solutions, as they can be edited online and in real time by multiple team members.
However, spreadsheets aren’t without their drawbacks. They have many limitations of their own, each of which can have significant downstream consequences. For example:
- Human error: As a manual scheduling tool, spreadsheets are prone to mistakes. In fact, an estimated 90% of spreadsheets contain errors. This can lead to double-bookings, time-zone mishaps and miscommunications that could cost you significant business.
- Booking the wrong participants: This is especially detrimental when it involves executives, as there’s a high opportunity cost for their presence. Their time may be better spent elsewhere, such as in other meetings with high-value accounts.
- Lack of meeting data: Spreadsheets don’t integrate well with critical resources, such as customer relationship management (CRM) software. This makes it difficult to link them to more meaningful data, especially those related to opportunities and sales.
- Inefficiency: Manual processes are slow and often redundant, and make it hard to accommodate last-minute changes. This can greatly limit the number of meetings you book, thereby severely undercutting sales potential.
- Lack of automation: Spreadsheet-based appointment scheduling is too complex to support a high volume of meetings. Worse yet, it doesn’t allow you to book appointments based on topics of interest, availability, location or context.
These complications run counter to your business priorities. Spreadsheets make managing and scheduling appointments a tedious, painstaking process, and worst of all, they can severely derail your growth opportunities.
Calendar apps for appointment scheduling
Calendar apps — Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook and so on — are essential to keeping track of individual schedules and booking appointments. However, they’re ineffective when used for marketing and sales programs, especially without the help of a master calendar system.
When used on their own, marketers and other stakeholders inevitably run into challenges. Basic calendar apps lack functionality and are still largely a manual process. Without any automation, the booking process is time-consuming and error-prone.
Additionally, meeting managers may need to coordinate dozens (if not hundreds) of calendars at a time. Calendar-based appointment scheduling apps don’t make it easy to manage meetings at scale, which can result in double booking prospects and slow, drawn-out workflows.
Keep in mind that online scheduling is a two-way street. Whereas sales reps may be scheduling meetings with target prospects, customers may also book appointments on their own. It’s up to the marketing team to ensure inbound meeting requests are managed appropriately.
However, this experience is often cumbersome for inbound requestors. Although users have some line of sight into stakeholder availability, calendars aren’t mapped to specific topics, products and categories. Inevitably, a prospect may book a meeting, only to realize their scheduled appointment is with the wrong expert or executive relative to their needs.
Furthermore, basic calendar apps require back-and-forth communication to manage changes. This not only further complicates the process, but also detracts from the customer experience.
Free and/or B2C tools
Between rising inflation rates and soaring event costs, it’s no surprise that 75% of organizations are asking their marketing teams to “do more with less.” In turn, some enterprises may be tempted to cut back on expenses and rely on free-to-use scheduling apps.
However, this approach would be sorely misguided. Free appointment scheduling software may be more cost-effective than one with a paid plan, but such a solution isn’t made to be used for enterprise-level applications.
Free and low-cost appointment scheduling apps are more appropriate for small businesses and B2C organizations in niche industries. For example, Square Appointments and its basic feature set are ideal for salon owners, whereas Acuity Scheduling is best for workshops and classes. They do well in terms of scheduling 1-to-1 meetings, but fall short when it comes to the more complex enterprise-level use cases. Most don’t allow you to schedule different types of meetings, manage approvals or set capacity restrictions on meeting locations.
Enterprises operate at an incomparably larger scale and require tools that manage hundreds of meetings at a time. Moreover, each meeting must be tied to programs and events that focus on engaging customers and other external parties to grow business at a greater volume and velocity.
Another downfall of low-cost B2C online scheduling platforms is that they’re inadequate for managing and automating complex workflows with valuable resources. For example, their limited capabilities may include automatic reminders, but none automate approvals for meeting requests or map appointments to topics of interest.
Meeting schedulers for B2B sales and marketing teams
High-performance B2B sales and marketing teams need more than just Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar integration. Given the complexity of enterprise appointment scheduling, they require a more robust, advanced and streamlined solution.
Let’s put the workflow into perspective. Consider the roles that internal and external participants play in scheduling customer engagements:
- Internal: Sales reps are responsible for leveraging their client relationships and market expertise to engage potential customers and book them into meetings or sessions.
- External: It’s likely that customers will request meetings as a result of your outbound marketing strategy. When they do, it’s vital you offer a seamless customer experience and make it easy for them to book appointments related to the topics and products of their choice. They may be looking for a specific meeting type, such as a product demo, so you should deploy a scheduling app that allows you to do so.
Clearly, this work is too cumbersome for any ordinary appointment scheduler to handle. Organizations require a more purpose-built platform, such as Jifflenow’s eCampaign software.
eCampaign is a meeting scheduling automation solution that can support multiple meeting types simultaneously. Made specifically for high-performance B2B sales and marketing teams, it streamlines the appointment booking process from start to finish.
Intelligent and customizable forms allow prospects to easily register for sessions or book appointments based on meeting type, topic, location and more. The platform also automates invitations and reminders, maximizing attendance and helping you make the most of every opportunity. Plus, with Salesforce, Marketo and other integrations, you can glean valuable insights from meeting data and trace outcomes back to individual demand-gen campaigns.
Meeting scheduling automation for B2B events
Meetings go hand-in-hand with trade shows, conferences and exhibitions. With so many prospects in one place, events give your marketing team a chance to generate leads, advance pipeline and convert customers in a short period of time.
However, scheduling and managing appointments is even more important in this unique context. According to Gartner, the average B2B organization spends almost 22% of its total marketing budget on trade shows and conferences. As event costs rise, marketers are under constant pressure to justify expenses with a positive return on investment.
Of course, the best way to do that is by maximizing customer meetings, which can be an especially difficult challenge. Not only do marketers have to pre-schedule attendees to ensure their investments are worthwhile, but they must also account for walk-in appointments on the trade show floor. This can be a great way to offset costs in case pre-booked appointments are no-shows or cancellations, although they still require a fast and efficient scheduling process. Likewise, teams must also navigate the complexities of shared and private meeting rooms, booth tours, last-minute changes and other event-related nuances.
Fortunately, that’s exactly what meeting scheduling automation software like Jifflenow’s eEvent platform provides. Enterprises can leverage eEvent’s configurable and scalable workflow tools to automate behind-the-scenes processes and simplify meeting management.
For example, you can pre-schedule thousands of meetings mapped directly to topics, experts, locations, meeting types and more. Automate approvals, reminders and notifications to maximize attendance and engage more customers. Use the software’s centralized dashboard to manage workflows, including check-ins, briefings and follow-ups.
More than a meeting tool, eEvent is your valuable source of meeting analytics. Its reports and dashboards help you easily track metrics, including:
- Number of meetings booked.
- Resource utilization rates.
- Most popular topics.
- Influenced revenue.
- Pipelines advanced.
Use these indicators to understand individual, meeting and event performance. Pull valuable insights from the data to drive continuous improvement, demonstrate ROI and secure your future marketing budget.
Optimize your scheduling today
Booking customer meetings is difficult enough as it is, let alone on an enterprise level. B2B companies require purpose-fit solutions made to simplify the process at the speed and scale expected of today’s competitive landscape.
Request a demo today to learn more about how Jifflenow can help you streamline scheduling and drive growth throughout your business.
