Skip to main content

Changing My Scheduling Calendar For 2025

This blog usually has actionable sales tips and advice to help you succeed in your business. This time, I wanted to take a look at another part of your business, which is scheduling appointments or sales calls or whatever you need to schedule. 

Having a scheduling calendar that your prospects can make your job so much easier. Instead of calling back and forth to pin a time to meet down, you can let your prospect/client pick their own time. According to FinancesOnline.com, online scheduling can lead to 26% more customers, so sharing your calendar is a real no-brainer.

I have a Google calendar that I use to book appointments, but I have also been using Calendly and sharing it on my website and social media. The two calendars are supposed to sync up to avoid double bookings, but recently I discovered an issue. 



I had blocked out a couple of days on my Google calendar for a business conference, but Calendly was still showing those days as available. After trying to find a way to fix this (I'm not a computer tech person), I threw in the towel. As much as I like the idea of Calendly, fighting with their chatbot and watching a lot of useless YouTube videos on the subject, my frustration led me to look for an alternative.

Fortunately for me, I discovered that Google has enhanced their calendar to where it can be used as an appointment scheduler and is now shareable with prospects clients. After watching a couple of videos (again, thanks to YouTube), I managed to remove the Calendly scheduler and replace it with the Google one. Since then I've changed out all the links on my social media platforms, as well as any email signatures that I send out. 

Many of the same features are there, like blocking out days of the week and putting time minimums as to when people can schedule in advance. But instead of wondering if it is going to sync up, it already does.

I'm sure that the folks at Calendly are nice people, but since I never had the opportunity to talk to a person and get the problem resolved, I made my life a little easier. 

Scheduling a time to meet a prospect or client is hard enough. Make your life a little easier by letting others set appointments. And if you would like to schedule a time for a phone appointment with me, click here. 


Chris Castanes is a humorous speaker who helps sales people succeed through workshops and humorous presentations. His new book, "Nearly Motivated" is available on Amazon. For booking information, click here. He's also the president of Surf Financial Brokers selling life and disability insurance in several states.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Telemarketer's Leads - A Dumb Story

For a brief few months I worked as a telemarketer for a small firm owned by a young married couple. The husband was a bit of a hot head and kind of a jerk on occasion, but his wife was nice and had to put up with the guy.  One of their clients was a mobile home company that wanted people to come to the lot and see how awesome their singlewides and doublewides were. As telemarketers we offered incentives like a cooler and camera (back when they weren’t part of your phone) and other assorted giveaways. We got a small commission if we could book the client. My coworkers and I would call from a list of leads that our employers had purchased from someone. These leads were supposedly “qualified” ahead of time, meaning that they had been vetted to meet the needs of the client, the mobile home company. Unfortunately, most of the leads were useless. The people we spoke to didn’t live in the right geographical areas or their incomes were too low.  “Why aren’t you guys closing anyone?” t...
Post a Comment
Read more

How To Prevent (Or Lessen) Momentum Killers

Have you had a great sales run, with the wind at your back as you continue to sell and make money, only to have some event or holiday slow down your momentum? It's happened to all of us. I compare it to running at full speed down a field, and out of nowhere comes a patch of mud and tar, designed specifically to slow you down and make you work harder.  An example of this is the holiday season. For some industries, the end of the year is a great time to make those last minute sales and thin out inventories. But for others, it can be horrible. Let's face it, the holidays are about spending money on fun stuff, like electronics and clothes. No one is even thinking about buying insurance, unless they have to.  "I can't spend any money on life insurance because I have to buy Christmas gifts," is what I hear each year. (Nice priorities, by the way!) Having been through this for a few years I now plan ahead. Instead of beating my head against a wall trying to get people to...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Short Post On Social Media

Are you leveraging social media to help your business? Are you posting daily and creating content like the "experts" say to do? Most importantly, are you getting results? I've tried using most of the more popular platforms for my insurance business, as well as my writing and speaking business. To say the results are "mixed" would be generous. This may be because I really haven't invested much into advertising on these platforms.  The way I see it, when Facebook, for example, allows me to set up a free page for my business, that is like a "free trial" to see if I can get any interest in my product or service. After nearly 15 years of this trial period, I have garnered little to no business.  One can come up with two arguments here. The first is why would you throw money at advertising when you haven't seen any returns. The other side is that "you could have done better if you had quit being a tight ass penny pincher." Fair enough. But ...
Post a Comment
Read more