If your company is busy, it’s a good sign because it means you’re making money! Part of any business involves booking meetings with prospective and existing customers. Your sales staff will no doubt use some kind of CRM to help them achieve those goals.
The thing is; many companies have an inefficient appointment booking system! It’s not uncommon to hear of people double-booking by mistake. That often happens when there’s only a single user system available. Other times, errors in the software could cause booking mistakes too.
As you can appreciate, such situations are somewhat embarrassing for the companies concerned! It also means that you are likely to annoy your clients if you have to make them reschedule a meeting. In worst case scenarios, they might just go elsewhere and take their custom with them!
Today I will give you some hot tips on how you can improve your firm’s appointment booking processes. That way, your sales staff can be more efficient at what they do. And, your business will have a better handle on how it manages sales prospects. Here is what you need to know:
Make sure you’ve got a set metric
Let’s face it; your field staff can only do a specific number of visits each day. That’s because they have to account for travel time, delays and so forth. It’s crucial that you have a set metric in place so that your staff don’t over-commit themselves.
For example, the first thing you should do is ensure your field agents have a territory. That means they only cover a particular part of the country. Depending on how many staff you’ve got, this could get drilled down to region or city level.
Next, you’ll need to consider how many meetings a day they can attend. The larger their territory, the fewer visits they can make. As you can imagine, hiring more staff means that you can cover more meetings each day.
Use a reliable booking system
It’s crucial that your company only uses an appointment scheduling system that works. Anything less than perfect should not get considered for the task. Especially if you’ve got hundreds of people using the same software!
The perfect system should:
- Allow many users to access and update it at the same time;
- Offer a Web SMS facility for texting customers appointment reminders;
- Be accessible on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
The good news is there are plenty of solutions out there for companies that want a robust platform. I recommend trialling a few different ones to see which is good for your business.
Account for vacation time and sickness
One challenge of booking customers for meetings is making sure your staff turn up for them! It’s important that employees don’t book meetings for days when they are on vacation. As you can imagine, a no-show isn’t a good look for a company trying to win some new business!
The other part of the challenge is dealing with sickness. As you know, there’s no way you can predict when a worker will phone in sick. Make sure you’ve got backup cover in place so that meetings don’t have to get postponed or canceled.
Good luck!
