Head of Inbound Sales, Fes, provides tips on how to use meetings calendars on your site, in chat, video and on social channels, to generate early-stage sales conversations.
You can also view the full video here.
Tips To Generate Early-Stage Sales Conversations With Meetings Apps, Chat and Video
Full Transcript
Hey guys, Fes here from Strategic IC, another quick video from me on actionable tips for B2B sales and marketing teams. This is in support of our event on Wednesday the 19th of September; we're running a session with HubSpot, a breakfast session, where we're going to be talking about sales and marketing alignment and how B2B marketing teams can help sales teams generate more early-stage sales conversations.
Note: this September 2018 event has now passed, however the tips included in this article remain relevant.
So one of the tactics that we may look at in the session and I'm going to talk about here is helping promote the sales team or account team, or even the CEO's availability to connect with prospects and accounts that they're looking to engage with and just making that whole process really simple.
So this is the HubSpot meetings tool, and it's a tool that other vendors have. You can use calend.ly, but HubSpot has a really nice UX and integration with calendars. So I'll just show you quickly how this works and how you can drive even more value through these types of meeting tools. So this is my meetings landing page, so I've connected this to my Gmail accounts. If you're using Microsoft Office 365 or Gmail, you can connect the tool to the HubSpot platform and it identifies your availability. So as you can see on the twelfth, I'm only available for about half an hour. So book me now! But if I jump over to the HubSpot tool, this is the HubSpot meetings tool here, or just create a link. You can set this up for individuals or as a team using round robins, but as a personal meetings page, it goes through four steps. So you enter the details, the information that you're trying to create the calendar for.
You configure that you align it with the availability that's identified in your existing calendar. So it's a really smart tool using automation to identify availability, and then promoting this availability to your prospects and contacts.
Then, you want to create questions to ask somebody when they're trying to book a meeting. Keep this low friction. So don't ask a million questions, capture their name, their contact details maybe email, phone number. Perhaps you don't even need to make the phone number mandatory because you're going to set up a WebEx. Find out perhaps if they're going to invite anybody else, get some other people's contact details in there. Just make sure it's low friction and quick. That's the point of these meeting links. Make the process fast. So once you've set that meeting page up, it generates a landing page like this where people find the availability and then they can book a session with you. It's a really quick and simple way to make your team's availability accessible to the people that they're trying to connect with.
Now, how do you use these pages? Well, there's a number of ways, definitely put in your team's email signatures, but also you can use it in sequences. So sequences are the process of following up your inbound leads. So this is the HubSpot sequence tool and this is a template email that we created and we're going to personalise this using information about what they've downloaded, their LinkedIn profile information, and then we're going to add in here just simply a link to the meeting tool. So if somebody wants to have a conversation about whatever we've discussed in this email, they can quickly access your team's availability and then connect with them to start a conversation and to book a meeting.
So where else can we use these meeting tools? Well, definitely add it to your website. So if I was to go to our website, people are navigating our site learning about inbound and account-based marketing and they want to understand more about our services.
They go to our ABM services page for example. They're looking to request some free consultancy. They then can go down to our book a planning consultation. And right there on our website page is my meetings calendar for anyone to come to the page who's been interested in account-based marketing and wants to speak to me to learn more about it. And they can find a time when they're free. They may be reading this content at 10 o'clock at night when they are at home, but now they've come to the point where they really want to speak to me and they can go to the website and quickly book a meeting. If you have a solutions expert that's in your sales team that's focused on a specific product area in a specific territory, you can add their calendar to your local page for that solutions area.
It's a really easy way to help sales team generate conversations with people that are actually interested in your solutions area. So where else can you add these meeting links? Well, if you're creating video content like this - I'm using the Vidyard tool here - then you can definitely customise your Vidyard landing page. And you can also add a 'book a call with me' CTA, to your video content. I'm going to be talking more about this in a later video as well. But that's another area that you can use your meetings link in; in your content, on your website and your emails, and then again in your video content.
One more would be in your chat bots. So here's our chat bot on our website. If somebody is on our website and they want to book some time, they can click agency services. Would you like to book some time with one of our strategists? Yes. Great. And then it takes them to a page where they can start to access my calendar again and they can book a time to talk to me. Really quick. Really low friction. 24/7. The sales team doesn't have to be just booking appointments with people that they're talking to on the phone. It's about making that time more accessible for people that want to speak to them.
And then the last one here, I'll show you quickly is on LinkedIn. So this is the LinkedIn desktop page and you can see 'book a call with me' here. Obviously links don't show on the desktop version of the page, but they do show on the mobile app version of your LinkedIn profile, so if you're going to add a link to your profile, make sure you have a meetings link in your profile where people once they're on your LinkedIn profile, can read about your expertise and then if they want to talk to you, they have a quick and easy way to book some time when you're both available.
So again, make these forms low friction, make them accessible and available to everybody on your website, on your landing pages, your video content on your chat bots, on your website and in LinkedIn.
I hope that helps. If you have any questions, get in touch, book a meeting with me, or message me on LinkedIn.
Video transcribed by Temi.