How I use Calendly in my consulting business

hello and welcome to another one of my youtube training videos today I want to tell you and explain how I use calendly within my consulting business calendar as at all I have been using since day one in my business and since before day one I was using it personally but since day one running my consulting business I've used this tool I heavily rely on it to schedule calls with you know new people new clients that want to work with me and existing clients that need to get on my calendar to have a call with me as well it's far better than trying to do everything via email and people often say you know are you available at this time I do send them the link because I do I can get booked up to two weeks in advance for this is the easiest way and the fairest way I think to be fair to all clients and people that want to book me they say look book a time here it's kind of a first-come first-served deal and I think that's just the fairest thing that I can do so that's what I'm talking about today if you have any questions about calendly please leave me a comment below so in currently you can see here I've set up multiple event types these are different links and event types that I can send people based on the type of call that I'm taking so these first two green ones here these are the kind of introductory calls that I offer so I have a basic consulting introductory call and a prayer priority $50 introductory call so this is the these are the options that I show people on my website so if I go to asana consulting i've got buttons that link to these pages and embedded options so here if you click this button here it opens the tab to book one of these options and down here I've got it embedded as well so you can book either a regular introductory call there is a one to two weeks waiting list or if you want to talk to me now or you know want to talk to me like in the next day or two you can book a priority slot which has the $50 fee attached to it so this is these are the first two options that I have that I linked people to on my website these other options here these yellow ones these are kind of the ones that I send existing clients if they need to book like a 30 a 1 hour 90 minute call with me so these aren't public these are not viewable on that normal on this this is my you know calendly link everyone has this you can't view these options on that page you can only view those introductory calls so let me walk you through the different settings in calendly and talk through kind of my thought process behind different things so obviously you know I've given given the event type of name I've connected calendly to zoom I use oom for all of my client calls I find it to be the most reliable web conferencing tool out there absolutely love it I find it's more popular now as well most people have come across zoom I'm finding so most people know how to use it and I just find it's a great tool to use the nice thing about connecting it here and camel it calendly is when somebody makes that booking they actually schedule to the callin zoom so when I open up the zoom app on my Mac here it says start your call with you know the client and I can just click start it generates a new zoom link for each client so there's no risk of people entering the same zoom room which I have had happen if you just send somebody like a generic meeting room link so that's a really nice way to have unique meeting rooms for each client and have those scheduled when people book book a session with you obviously I've put in the description like what is the call about I've had to make this quite clear with especially the consulting introductory calls that these are introductory calls I'm not giving away like free advice you know it's a discovery to meet one another and see if I can help and you can customize the link in the the color options here setting your availability is can require a bit of thought what I actually did is on an Apple note as I set up I just screenshotted my different event types so you can see here I take priority calls first thing in the morning from 6:30 to 7:00 to make sure that if I get fully booked during the day I still have an available slot for those priority those $50 slots so there's no overlap with these other event types you'll see so I do my priority calls first thing then I have you know my one hour 90 minute 30 minute links all have this availability here so I'm generally available for an hour and a half in the morning I have a break I'm available for another two hours have lunch and then I'm available for another what's that two and a half hours in the afternoon so I have to make sure ice factor in some breaks during the day otherwise if you just a generic availability from 9:00 to 5:00 it's very easy to get booked up back-to-back so I've set up my availability like this so I have some programmed in you know scheduled breaks during the day I did have it more just like a generic window of time early on in the early days and I was finding I was getting overbooked and I would just be on calls for hours so I found since doing this it's been a lot easier to schedule my time so you want to give some thought to if you aren't especially if you are using different event types when you're gonna be available for different types of call and here this is where you can specify is this a secret event or not will it appear on that generic calendar link so this is my priority call so no it is available which is which is good down here so some questions and things that I asked people obviously name email is a given I think that's you can't even change that I really like calendly recently gave you the option to add guests as well so they can actually add guests to their booking which is nice with my calls I do request phone numbers especially for those introductory calls if they are having trouble connecting on zoom' or if I want to follow up with them after the call I I do ask for their phone number so I just have a personal way to reach out to them as well I obviously need to know what service they're inquiring about and I've given them an opportunity to type in some information when they book with me about what kind of things they need help with so those are some questions that I ask with my generic you know one hour and 90 minute client booking links I just asked name and email actually I don't even think I have these other options this is more for the introductory calls then we have some notification settings and a cancellation policies so I've setup calendly so that it will add an event to my Google Calendar and it actually invites the invitee as well it's quite nice actually that's a really good integration most people use Google Calendar and it's nice because if they ever have to cancel the call if they select decline it will actually show up on the calendar which is really nice you I have set up some email reminders just the normal templated ones are fine so I think it a male's people 24 hours before their booking and I have set up a cancellation policy as well this is something I've gotten a little bit more strict on over the years I was having some issues and members of my private slack group have mentioned this as well is people just not showing up for their calls whether it's a new person like a new client who's inquiring to talk to me or it might be an actual client they just don't show up unfortunately I've had to get a little bit stricter on this because you know I do get booked two weeks in advance I don't think it's fair for somebody to just book a time and then say oh sorry I was busy and that was kind of attitude I was hearing it oh sorry I couldn't show up I got busy at the last minute and I I just find it a little bit disrespectful I think people should honor you know the the booking that they've made so I've said look please give 48 hours No if you need to cancel or reschedule last-minute or if you don't show up there might be a you might lose your call in this case if it's an introductory call or there might be a fee to rebook so something I've become a little bit more strict on and that I do include yeah to give people the option to cancel or reschedule in in the in the email which is good because people do people do use it often they will give me a weeks notice which is obviously fine there is the option to set up a confirmation page this is something I've done so when they book like an introductory call with me here they will get redirected to a booking confirmed page now the reason I've done this is I've set up a Google Analytics tracking pixel on that page so it's actually a way because I do use Google AdWords to get leads for my business it's a way that I can somewhat measure what it's costing me to get new bookings which is nice so they get redirected to that booking confirm page on my site the Google AdWords pixel or analytics pixel is there and so it can it can track that conversion this is a feature I old question years ago it took them a long time to implement this but this is really nice there are some other redirect options as well and then finally this is you can collect payment this is obviously only something I do with the priority option but I've connected with stripe you can connect with PayPal and it you can just set the fee and I've just linked to my Terms of Service on my website and so the final thing I wanted to show you is a couple of ways that I'm automating and using calendly with with zapier so a couple of zaps than where I use currently is number one is when I take an introductory booking one of these to a contact and a deal will be set up in pipedrive so I have this example here I won't talk through every step here there's quite a lot going on but essentially this app currently is the trigger it continues if it's a consulting booking only because I do have those different event types so it only runs if it's a consulting booking adds a conversion to proof it will format the event type and name as title case so it's just a bit of reformatting of data it will find or create a person update that person find or create a deal update the deal create an activity for myself to call them create an activity for my assistant to confirm the booking actually that's something I'm I started doing about a year ago is they my assistant Kylie she will confirm the 24 hours before and just check they're still available and then I have a few extra steps if it is a priority booking it will create a $50 deal attach a product and mark that as one just so I have that $50 payment recorded in pipedrive so that's ones app that I use to integrate calendar with pipedrive something else I do as well is if I have a client booking so again the same trigger it's when an invitee is created it will look up the call duration and it will then find the appropriate tag because I tagged my calls with the length of the call it will then find the client in a client's project in asana and create a sub task for the calls you'll be like Paul miners call one hour and that's just a really nice way that I can track how many calls I do with each client and automatically having those come over into asana I do update a log here as well in Google sheets this is something I was wanting sort of a feature that calendly lacks is you can't set like only booked me for a certain number of hours throughout the day and so I only want to be booked let's say four hours each day you can set up a limit at the event type level so you can say I only want to do four consulting calls but I don't really care about that I just want to set my total availability as only being available for let's say four hours so what I did is I created some zaps that update a sheet with the number of hours I've been booked for that day then if the shift that day reaches a four hour limit zapier will then go and block out my day and say that I'm no longer available that's because and this is quite a cool feature is with your calendar connection you can specify what calendars can be checked for as conflicts so here for example appointments which is my calendly bookings obvious obviously counts as a check for complex four that I can't be booked at the same time for two people but I have this one here called busy so if I want to on my calendar I can block out timers being busy and that way I cannot be booked during that time so that's something I did with with zapier they're a little bit more advanced to make sure I can't be booked too much in one day there's like a four or five hour limit or something like that so there you have it that's a bit of a behind-the-scenes look at how I use calendly to manage my consulting business if you have any questions please leave me a comment below and thank you very much for watching this video

Channel: Paul Minors

Views: 15,955

Keywords: calendly, consulting, business, appointment, calendar, scheduling app, calendly tutorial, calendly demo, how to use calendly, online appointment scheduling, how to setup an online appointment calendar, automated booking calendar, how to set up calendly

Id: aJcHBFJCkiM

Length: 11min 6sec (666 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 31 2019