Digitization and globalization served the folks in the sales & marketing industry with a myriad of opportunities across the globe.
Especially in B2B, more and more prospects living in different time zones are exposed to thousands of organizations, and seek for “the one” to close a deal as fast as possible.
Your sales team should be available to take on this opportunity and turn this into a sale in the right place, at the right time.
That’s why, today, I will be opening a discussion around scheduling.
For the longest time, sales teams arranged client meetings manually via phone or email, asking them back-and-forth to find a mutually suitable time.
As this has been a part of the lead engagement process, automation in scheduling has been vastly overlooked.
Considering most sales teams still rely heavily on manual workflows, it is proven that setting up a single meeting takes an additional 4 hours (if not more) stretching out the sales cycle even longer.
Regardless of the size of your company, as a sales manager, you want to adopt a system that will not only shorten this lengthy sales process but also has a positive impact on your team’s overall efficiency.
Consider Smart Lead Assignment
Before we go into the nitty-gritty bits of automating your scheduling, I’d like to point out the importance of smart lead assignment.
Let me paint a picture for you.
Your top sales people are going to attend a networking conference this week to speak to potential clients and generate more leads, and you have a few new hires that show promise but you don’t necessarily have a previous track record on them.
Considering the time and money spent for transportation, accommodation, salary and food, how many deals in total can these sales people in the networking conference close after all?
Or are the new hires going to be as efficient turning the hot leads into paying customers in the absence of the experienced sales team?
These are just two situations with a potential to be profitable, but realistically, you have to keep in mind that inefficiencies in your day-to-day may not only cost you thousands of dollars (if not more) but also kill your deals.
Don’t fall into the error of repeatedly making exceptions to keep things fair.
Rather, adopt a process that will assign lead generation tasks smart and fairly.
Timeliness – a key factor in qualifying leads
Fast growth requires effective sales processes in place.
I recently wrote an article on Speed to Lead, where we discussed the importance of lead response time when the businesses want to leave the most favourable impression on your prospects.
Meaning that the sooner a sales rep approaches your prospects, the likelihood for conversion is much higher.
Even a difference of 20 minutes makes a significant impact on whether a lead gets qualified.
If you are aiming for more revenue and boost up the interest in your product or service, the simplest step you can take is to prioritize response time.
Smart task assignment and fast lead response time bring us to our main focus: Round-robin scheduling.
Automate Scheduling with Round-Robin
Alright, let’s slow down a bit and explain what Round-robin stands for.
The term dates back to the 16th century as a way of signing an important document in a circular fashion to avoid identification of signees.
Today, Round-robin is an algorithm in tech and used mainly for scheduling meetings in a circular fashion, with each attendee having an equal chance at receiving the invite.
Simply put, automated Round-Robin:
- Resolves conflicts
- Decides between availability or fairness
- Eliminates the time spent in spreadsheets and checking for mutual availability
Regardless of the size of your business or its stage of growth, if you are operating in B2B, you must prioritize bringing efficiency into your CTA funnel.
This way, you are in total control of turning your website visitor into qualified leads, scheduling demos and closing deals.
A properly automated scheduling system will facilitate better time management for your sales team by finding the right balance between connecting with leads and managing other tasks.
Another goodie is that you can embed the scheduling link to your website’s CTA button to be able to convert inbound traffic as well!
Your inbound prospects will be re-routed to your sales team’s calendar based on availability, working hours and workload.
Doesn’t that sound great? Now let’s get right into it.
Take Action Quick, but Efficient
Before deploying Round-robin technology to your sales & marketing team, there are a few things to checkmark!
Make sure that all of your sales reps are well-equipped to respond to hot inbound leads and their inquiries.
Deploy smart sales & marketing solutions and automate your sales pipeline.
Utilize a lead engagement software. This will allow you to contact new prospects and enrich your outbound marketing efforts immensely.
Depending on your inbound sales volume, it is good practice to divide your sales team into round-robin pools. That is, have a dedicated team for inbound leads only and another for live events or outbound sales.
Depending on your scheduling automation, you can add variations to your invitation and make it more personalized, appealing to your invitees.
A great example would be customizing what information you require from your leads. At Ubico, we utilize the following process to understand how qualified our inbound leads are as they come into our pipeline.
Once you also punch in the working hours of each sales rep, vacations, public holidays etc. your scheduling automation will understand the general structure of your workflows and run as fairly as possible.
By implementing a smart scheduling software, you are not only paving the way for increased conversion rates but also giving your employees a peace of mind and preventing overload.
We call this combined availability. It allows fair assignment of leads throughout the team.
At Ubico, we integrated Scheduler as a free add-on to our lead engagement and prospecting platform to provide further flexibility with individual and team scheduling.
Here are a few support articles we wrote on the technicalities of the Ubico Scheduler.
Final Words on Round-Robin
The round-robin scheduling algorithm optimizes distribution among a pool of team members based on availability, priority or equal distribution.
Along with the CRM integration, this algorithm facilitates balanced categorization of calls, emails, web leads among your sales team members.
Round-robin will perform the best in terms of lead response time, so your leads will be matched with a sales rep instantaneously. This way, your leads will feel taken care of and well-accommodated.
Whether you are collaborating on a project, having loop interviews, or scheduling demo calls and product walkthroughs with your prospects, collective scheduling will enable you to accommodate all these tasks simultaneously taking your team size into consideration.
After all, just like automating your sales pipeline, creating smarter workflows for scheduling will provide your potential clients more flexibility and create visibility across the entire team.
Now, you can imagine a world where you do so much less to do prospecting, engaging and meeting with your leads.
On top of that, you get maximum speed and efficiency.
This is an attainable goal and we can absolutely transform the way you work through Ubico.
We fire up teams through sales and marketing automation through an intuitive, responsive workflow builder and scheduling automation.
At Ubico, we are experts in this field and would love to share this expertise with you. Never hesitate to contact us and ask away any questions!
