How to use Meeting Types for Faster Sales Scheduling
If your sales meeting process has room for improvement, then look no further. By using meeting types, you’ll effectively increase your show rates, reduce your admin workload, and book meetings with leads much faster.
This year, many industries and professions have experienced brand new ways of working, growing their companies, and connecting with customers. Although business as we know it is continually changing, there’s one vital part of the way we work that isn’t going anywhere: meetings.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, prefer to meet in-person or remotely, meetings remain a crucial part of how we engage leads, acquire new customers, and keep business going. And for sales, this is especially true.
As every salesperson knows, there’s a spectrum of meetings that take place across the sales funnel that has a significant impact on sales targets, including discovery calls, demos, closing meetings, customer onboarding, and more.
Let’s face it: meetings take a lot of time to plan and secure and too often have salespeople working like headless chickens to entice leads, lock in calls, and close. But it doesn’t have to be this way. By using smart scheduling software and intelligent features like meeting types, salespeople can streamline their meeting workflows, and book meetings at lightning speeds.
So, if you want to skip the busywork and improve the way you and your sales team organizes, tracks, and schedules meetings, then start using meeting types.
What are Meeting Types?
CalendarHero meeting types are templates for meetings you schedule frequently and often with the same criteria. Think of them as a blueprint for your popular meetings. When using a meeting type, you won't have to draft up the same old details repeatedly for every new meeting.
Pinned Meeting Types on the dashboard
With meeting types, you can edit details like your availability window (ex. "Discovery" calls from 9 am - 4 pm) and meeting duration (ex. 30 min). You can also connect to your favorite video platforms to auto-populate a video conferencing link in your booked meetings. CalendarHero connects to a host of video platforms, including Zoom.us, Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, and Google. You can also add meeting instructions, set buffer time to give yourself free space between meetings, and add questions to collect lead-qualifying information in your meeting requests.
Another fantastic reason to use meeting types is the ability to use the real-time availability of your coworkers or collaborators to schedule more complex meetings. We’ll share more on that below.
How to use a Meeting Type
Here’s a quick overview of how you can use a meeting type:
1. Schedule a meeting: Simplify and speed up scheduling throughout the sales funnel by automatically scheduling meetings in CalendarHero using your meeting types.
2. Share a scheduling link: Copy a scheduling URL for any of your meeting types and share it with your invitees in a direct message or email to easily self-book time with you.
3. Embed: Place a meeting scheduling call to action on your website by embedding a scheduler for your meeting type on any web page. That way, qualified leads can connect to you and your reps directly on your website.
4. Add to a directory page: Create a public page for your meeting types to provide invitees a single destination to self-book meetings with you.
To get the most out of your meeting types, we suggest building a meeting type for each of your sales funnel milestones. That might include meeting types for discovery calls, product demos, onboarding hand offs, and closing meetings as well as internal team meetings like sales forecasting, sales pipeline, and sales/marketing alignment. At CalendarHero HQ, we’ve created meeting types for similar meetings with different time variations, such as a 15-min demo for those who are short on time and a 30-min demo for others who want more detail.
Meeting types help you cut out time-consuming manual work that most sales meetings, both internal and external, typically take to organize. As a result, you get to move leads through your pipeline faster and elevate how your team collaborates.
Ways to Customize Meeting Types for Powerful Scheduling
Every CalendarHero user receives default meeting types, but this feature's real power is when you customize your own templates for your unique meeting workflow.
Here's what you can customize:
1. Name & Link
What's in a name? Give your meeting type a good name that you'll recognize, a default title for the calendar event, and edit the URL for your associated scheduling link.
You can also choose to give invitees the option to add guests to your meetings. If you've ever been surprised to find multiple people on a call that you thought would be a 1:1 session, this custom setting will save you from any guessing games. It makes it easy for your invitee, let's say, a promising new lead, to add their team members (aka important decision-makers) to your meeting without any hassle. CalendarHero will automatically find the best time for everyone to meet and notify you of any additional guests.
2. Availability
Just because there's an opening in your calendar, it doesn't mean you’re game for a meeting. In this section, you can proactively protect your time and control when specific meetings can happen. Prefer discovery calls in the morning? Set your availability window for your "discovery" meeting type from 9 am to 12 pm. That way, your invitees won't be able to pick an afternoon time slot to meet with you. Want Fridays all to yourself? Uncheck "Friday" from your availability window to keep that day meeting-free.
Let's be real: no one enjoys a last-minute meeting, and that's where smart time-management features like lead time come in handy. With lead time, you can set a minimum notice of time required before a meeting can be scheduled with you. That way, you can have ample time to whip up a deck or do client research before a new event is added to your calendar.
Tired of back-to-back video calls? Set buffer time. With buffer time, you can create breathing room between meetings. Add a buffer before the meeting starts, and right after it ends to have space to write notes, prepare for your next meeting, or rest your eyes for a few minutes.
Some meetings are just more important than others. And that's why the priority setting can be a game-changer when you're trying your hardest to secure time with high-demand prospects. Once enabled, the priority setting tells CalendarHero to book over internal meetings if those are your only time slots that work for a VIP client. After all, if that VIP turns into a signed client, your coworkers won't mind one bit.
If you've ever felt that internal or cross-department collaboration was a barrier in your scheduling process, then prepare to be blown away by what you can do with CalendarHero's shared availability settings. In a nutshell: shared availability lets you use your collaborators or coworkers' real-time availability in magical ways to make complex meetings happen instantly.
Here’s a breakdown of common sales meetings and the specific shared availability options we recommend using:
Meeting: Service/ProductDemo
Shared Availability Option: Round Robin
Sometimes it’s not about who a lead talks to as much as it’s about having them talk to someone ASAP. With Round Robin, you can have a lead pick a time to meet from your scheduling link, and CalendarHero will automatically assign the meeting to any available sales rep.
Meeting: Handoff
Shared Availability Option: On-behalf
When leads move through your pipeline, it's common for different team members to come into the mix to facilitate technical training, new client onboarding, and more. Seamlessly pass a lead to another team member with On-behalf. As the name suggests, this setting allows you to use someone else's calendar availability like an account manager, sales engineer, or customer success rep to book a meeting on their behalf automatically.
Meeting: Closing
Shared Availability Option: Collective
Need to get everyone together to close a big client? Don’t waste time on group coordination. Enable Collective to pool together your team’s calendar availability. Once enabled in your meeting type, your client will only pick time slots where each specified team member is available. Collective ensures group meetings happen quickly, and everyone who is supposed to be there can attend.
Learn how to work effectively as a team with shared availability →
3. Location & Conferencing
Of course, every meeting needs a place to meet. This section is where you can add your physical location, phone number, or connect your video conferencing platform. If it’s a remote meeting, CalendarHero will auto-populate a conferencing link in your scheduled meeting.
Want to leave it up to your client? Give your invitee the option to add or edit the location.
4. Additional Customization & Website Embed
Next, you’ll want to reinforce the purpose of your meeting. Add simple instructions to remind invitees why you’re meeting and what they can expect.
If you want to pre-qualify your prospects before you meet (we highly recommend this), add invitee questions to your meeting type. Your questions are added to your meeting request automatically when you schedule a meeting with the correlated meeting type.
If you want a faster way to connect website visitors to your sales reps, then swap the traditional contact form with a scheduler embed for your meeting type.
The CalendarHero embed is the most direct method to connect qualified leads to sales reps without having them leave your website.
CalendarHero is Built for Sales Teams
If there’s one thing sales teams can benefit from, it’s more time to do the most valuable parts of their jobs, which can only happen with the right technology and processes. With AI-powered scheduling, smart features like meeting types, and CRM integrations with platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, and ActiveCampaign, CalendarHero can transform a salesperson’s workday, helping them book meetings and sell faster.
Ready to use meeting types? Sign in or create a free account to experience AI-powered meeting scheduling right now.
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