Google's 'Unknown Sender' Policy and Chili Piper

Google has recently updated its default calendar settings to tackle unsolicited meeting invitations to personal emails in an effort to combat spam. This update aims to prevent spam invites from unnecessarily blocking Gmail users' calendars and being inundated with spam requests.

This setting is only a default when the prospect’s contact email is a personal email address. Sending calendar invitations to business emails should not be affected by this default setting.

If a calendar invitation is sent to a personal email, and you have not interacted with them via email, they will need to confirm their booking by clicking on a confirmation link within their email inbox.

As an example:

1. Contact uses a business email: joe@acme.com wants to buy from mary@spicycompany.com. Joe wants to book a meeting with them but they have never interacted before. Joe books a meeting with Mary from her scheduling link. The meeting invite appears in Joe’s calendar as normal.
2. Contact uses a personal email: bob@gmail.com wants to buy from mary@spicycompany.com. Bob wants to book a meeting with them but they have never interacted before. Bob books a meeting with Mary from her scheduling link. The meeting invite shows in Bob’s calendar only after Bob approves this invite in his email.

This feature has been created by google to stops spammers from calendar darting you and in theory, makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, this feature has left revenue teams feeling a little bit frustrated because every customer and prospect meeting matters, and every step that gets us closer to having the meeting is critical.

Who does this impact?

This default setting impacts B2C customers, or those selling into markets where personal gmails are primarily used. (Restaurants for example)

How is this related to Chili Piper?

If the sender is not a known source within your Gmail instance and matches the criteria described above, prospects using personal emails may not find the meeting invites unless they mark Chili Piper as a known sender. If they don't, they might miss the invites on their respective calendars and, consequently, miss meetings.

How to Avoid This Scenario?

Check out his comprehensive help article outlining all the possible options to mitigate this to make the booking process as simple as possible for invite recipients.

Chili Piper's Short-Term Plan: 

At Chili Piper, we practice what we preach. Here's what we've found helpful in the short-term to mitigate the additional step prospects and customers with a @gmail.com domain:

• We’re investigating whether Google is welcoming suggestions on how to make it easy for prospects who initiate this process to not have to do it twice for gmail accounts - these discussions are ongoing. 

• For Gmail domain users, we will be adding a feature in our product that has them check for their meeting invite in the confirmation screen. If they don’t see if and they don’t know how to approve it, they can just download an invite. 

*We are not sending an extra email to the prospect to accept the invite because they will receive this email directly from Google.

If you are feeling extra spicy and you prefer to be even more vigilant, borrow this hot tip from our customers: 

Set up a cadence from your prospecting team (via Outreach/Salesloft, Apollo)  to send out an email after the meeting is booked  using the “Booking Status” field on the lead/contact object from our Form Concierge and give them an extra good reason to triple check their inbox - because meeting with you is going to make their day!

Chili Piper's Long-Term Plan: 

The product team at Chili Piper is monitoring the situation should this default setting begin to impact business emails, and will be proactive in our approach to solve this should it arise. 

We understand this is an inconvenience to our users and is an obstacle for all scheduling software providers. Our product team is working hard to make this better for your team, and we’ll keep you updated as we have more solutions to share. The best b2b buying experience is a paramount for us, so if you have ideas that might improve this - please drop us a suggestion here.

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