Meeting schedulers keep the hot leads coming and stop entropy from creeping into your day.
They also keep your sales team from getting buried under an avalanche of tedious manual tasks so they can focus 100% on building and maintaining relationships.
If you need some help with daily meeting organization, this guide will give you exactly what you need to keep you and your team on track.
Google “meeting schedulers” and you get over half a million results.
There are a ridiculous number of options out there, with platforms capable of handling pretty much anything you can imagine.
But there are some definitive features that you’ll consistently see among today’s top software choices.meeting schedulers.
Here’s what to look for.
Whenever a lead selects a time for a meeting, your rep’s calendar should be automatically updated.
Otherwise, having to do it manually is going to cut into their productivity and will inevitably lead to mistakes and scheduling conflicts.
The best meeting scheduler tool should handle this for you and take the hassle out of lead outreach.
No shows are a pain in the SaaS, and studies have found that they typically range between 20 to 30%.
They’re “a silent quota killer” says Sam Belt of HubSpot and can quickly throw your sales reps off of their game.
One of the best ways to reduce no-shows is using a meeting scheduler tool with automated reminders.
All the meeting scheduler tools we’ve listed below have the option to send out multiple automated reminders before the meeting (however Chili Piper is the only one that has a native integration with Twilio for SMS reminders).
But how do you write a good reminder email? At Chili Piper, our automated reminders go out out one day, one hour, and one minute before a meeting:
This right there can be a gamechanger.
One of the best things you can do for your show rates is make it easy to reschedule.
Put yourself in your prospects’ shoes:
A last-minute meeting just came up on their end. They don’t want to email you, let you know what’s going on, send their availability, and see if they can get another time on the calendar.
It’s so much easier if they can just click “reschdule” and call it a day.
Using a platform with easy rescheduling allows them to do that, while preventing valuable leads from slipping through your fingers.
No software exists in a vacuum, and this is especially true for meeting schedulers.
Rather, they should integrate with your entire tech stack.
Chili Piper has 100+ integrations and counting — we’re adding new integrations every quarter.
Here are just a few types of software that Chili Piper integrates with:
We’re adding integrations all the time, so check our integration hub for the most up-to-date list of integrations.
One notable lack in many of the options discussed below is a Salesforce integration that both reads and writes from Salesforce.
This means that Chili Piper can:
Chili Piper is the only meeting scheduler with those capabilities — which is why Salesforce users love us so much.
OK, OK — we know that every single software company brags about their “intuitive, easy-to-use interface”.
But, in reality, the only person who can decide whether an interface is “intuitive” is you. Either by:
If you’re tryna take Chili Piper for a spin — get on our waitlist! We’ll let you know as soon as you can try our free meeting scheduler tool that’s specifically for customer-facing revenue reps.
“Cybercrime damages will cost the world10.5 trillion annually by 2025, up from $3 trillion in 2015,” says Cybersecurity Ventures. “Cyberattacks are the fastest growing crime in the US, and they are increasing in size, sophistication, and cost.”
Given that you’ll be storing a ton of sensitive information in your database, you want a provider that takes security seriously.
Everything from encryption to user authentication to data recovery should be airtight.
Here are some of the security features Chili Piper offers.
Now that you know what specific things to look for in meeting schedulers, here are the top seven platforms that will help you reach “Marie Kondo level” organization.
Chili Piper has one main goal — help your team schedule meetings faster, while making the process dead simple.
Here’s how it works.
A lead finds your booking link through your website, demo, email, etc. and selects a time that’s convenient for them.
Chili Piper automatically qualifies the lead and routes them to the appropriate sales rep — something that can be done either by setting up preconfigured rules combined with round robin routing.
The meeting automatically syncs with the rep’s calendar — so the prospect can immediately schedule a meeting at a time that works for them.
This takes the guesswork out of scheduling meetings and allows your team to pounce on leads while they’re scorching hot.
All the while, sales managers can keep a bird’s eye view on what’s happening with meeting-specific dashboards for both Salesforce and HubSpot:
Not only can Chili Piper help increase the volume of inbound meetings booked, it can have a massive impact on profitability.
“Right after we implemented Chili Piper we saw a 50% lift in inbound meetings booked,” says Krishan Patel, Director of Growth at Apollo.
“We now see 5x as many meetings as we did before starting with Chili Piper and our revenue is around 300% — even with half the size of the sales team.”
To learn more about Krishan’s experience, check out the full story.
Calendly is one of the most well-known options on the market.
A rep chooses their availability preferences and shares a scheduling link through either your website or their email.
Then, a lead can choose a meeting time that works for them based around your rep’s schedule.
Like Chili Piper, Calendly offers:
Here’s where Calendly and Chili Piper differ: Calendly and Chili Piper have similarities. Here's where they're different:
If that low-res table was too much for your eyes to handle, here's the TL;DR:
For all the details on the similarities and differences between Calendly vs. Chili Piper, please check out this in-depth discussion.
Calendar is a meeting scheduler tool with an emphasis on simplicity and user-friendliness. It’s a very basic scheduling tool that gets the job done.
Compared to more robust tools like Chili Piper and Calendly, its main differentiating features are:
Other than that, it’s pretty simple:
You sync Calendar with your Google Calendar or Outlook.
Then, you create a customized personal scheduling link, which lets leads select a meeting time based on their Calendar.
This makes the scheduling process fairly smooth and prevents scheduling conflicts.
While not quite as robust as Chili Piper and Calendly, Calendar gets the job done for many teams.
In layman’s terms, Demodesk combines video conferencing (like Zoom) with meeting schedulers (like Chili Piper) into one platform.
It’s great for budget-strapped teams who don’t want to shell out money for the best-in-class video conferencing/meeting scheduling — and just want something that keeps the lights on.
Let’s talk about what Demodesk’s meeting scheduler does:
And what it doesn’t do:
… and that’s just the short-list.
Long-story short, if you’re looking for a cheap way to consolidate video conferencing with meeting scheduling, Demodesk could be a good option to consider.
But if you’re looking for the best meeting scheduler for revenue teams — it’s just not it.
Doodle does what all meeting schedulers should do: eliminate those pesky back-and-forth emails.
But their claim-to-fame is their polling feature that makes it easy to find a time that works for a large group of people.
With Doodle, reps choose when they’re available, and leads can select a date and time that jives with their schedule.
Again, simple and barebones, but functional for teams that simply want easy scheduling.
It integrates with all of the usual suspects, including Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, Zoom, and Slack.
Like other top meeting schedulers, Doodle is compliant with security protocols. .
Truthfully, there aren’t any jaw-dropping features (and there are lots of Doodle alternatives). But if your main problem-to-solve is “finding the right time with a large group of people”, their meeting polling feature is the OG of all meeting polling. Calendly also has meeting polling, but polling isn’t their claim to fame.
Luckily, both Calendly and Doodle have a free version — so you can try out the meeting polling for yourself and see which one you like better.
Choosing the right platform with the right features that fits the needs of your team is the name of the game here to maximize the true potential of your customer facing reps.
So no matter how crazy things get, you can keep a steady stream of hot leads coming your way and strike while they’re red hot.
Want to learn more about how Chili Piper can help qualify, route, and schedule leads while they’re in the buying zone?