If you're a believer in working smarter not harder, then you and your team will absolutely love using HubSpot's Sales and Service hub tools which make the most repetitive tasks much less dreadful. I'll be going into depth on each of the Sales and Service hub tools in my HubSpot Like a Pro series, and this post will focus on the ever-popular HubSpot Meeting Links tool.
As Salespeople, our most important job is guiding the customer through our sales process and teaching them how to accurately assess and buy our products and/or services. Especially in an expensive and considered purchase, buyers typically don't have much experience, having gone through a buying process maybe a handful of times (at best) in their entire careers. Salespeople on the other hand, live and breathe their products every day, and have seen dozens of ways sales can close or fall apart.
So if you know how to sell your products/services better than your buyers know how to purchase them, then why would you let them determine how much time to take on your calendar?
One of the most common mistakes I see in people's meeting links is a choice: 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or an hour. How is the customer supposed to know how much time they'll need? One of the things I hated most when I was working at HubSpot and other SaaS companies was when people wanted to schedule a 15 minute demo, and then got upset when I disqualified them as real buyers and sent them a canned video instead. Only serious buyers were willing to commit to a 15 minute qualification call, a 30 minute discovery, and then a 60 minute demo, so I broke those calls into 3 separate meeting links with one duration option per link, allowing me to better control the process and guide the buyer at an appropriate pace.
So you can go ahead and delete the default 15/30/60 minute meeting link that HubSpot creates for you, and instead break those into 3 different links, to be sent when the occasion calls for it.
To find this next selection of settings, you will need to open additional settings on the Schedule tab.
When it comes to how far out someone can book a meeting, you want to make sure you're allowing for enough room to cover at least two full weeks on your calendar, but no more than a month maximum. If you stick with the default setting which is "this week and next week" and someone views your link on a Friday, then they'll only see options for the remainder of the current week and the full following week, which is effectively a little over 1 week of options. If you plan on taking a week off, then you risk showing no availability at all for a period of time, requiring your prospects to remember to come back to your link and try again when you're on vacation to book for the following week.
So the moral of the story is that at a minimum, you'll want to select 3 weeks lead time to show at least two full weeks at any given time, but no more than 5 weeks in order to limit reschedules.
And to be safe, you'll definitely want to make sure you have the Cancel & Reschedule box checked on the Overview Tab.
The Custom Date Range option is especially ideal for in-person meetings, such as showing availability during tradeshows or while traveling to visit clients and prospects and setting meetings while on location.
Whether you work from home or an office, 15 minutes notice time is not usually enough time to finish what you're doing, do some pre-call planning, or sometimes even see the notification that someone booked a meeting. This is the default setting for meetings links, and one that is often overlooked causing potential stressful situations for salespeople caught off guard.
This is more of a dealer's choice, but I'd recommend no less than 2 hours notice and no more than 1 day.
When sending a link to your calendar, ideally you don't want to show too much availability, and viewing a calendar with options every 15 minutes over the course of an 8 hour day can get overwhelming. Instead of the default 15, try the 30 or 60 minute increments. It also helps avoid awkward meeting start times like 3:15 or 3:45.
The form tab is easy to miss, but you'll find it in the Scheduling section, and you'll definitely want to edit it in order to properly qualify leads looking to take time out of your day. A good form will allow you to qualify the prospect, collect more information, and ask questions to help you come prepared to this meeting. By default, the form will ask for First Name, Last Name, and Email. While you may not want to make this form too long, here are a few other questions you may want to consider adding to this form to ensure you’re only letting qualified prospects book with you:
A lot of these settings are easy to miss in the first pass, but with this additional context and guided strategy you should be able to improve your meeting conversion rates and delight more customers in no time!
If you'd like more hands on help, don't hesitate to reach out for additional support! HubSpot has a lot of awesome features that even advanced users can often overlook. So if you feel your team is not fully adopting the HubSpot Sales or Service enablement tools, book a free consultation below to learn about how we can help train your teams on how to best use HubSpot for your specific use cases.