Scheduling the demo call with your prospect is an entire stage in the sales process and one of the most pressing challenges for B2B sales reps. So they say…
But at the same time, scheduled product demos are the ultimate goal for SDRs! And can take months to reach.
There are times when you won’t even make it to the point when you can schedule a demo because the prospect may ghost you out of the blue sky, in the middle of the sales cycle. Things happen!
Other times, your process of scheduling a product demo can be a pain point in itself and slow you down and make you lose opportunities.
Nurturing your leads to the point where you schedule a demo with them is not an easy job as well. But when you do get there, make sure that you are fully armed and prepared!
- Prepare your website to guide your visitors to book a demo themselves;
- Get all the information on your prospects you can;
- Reach out to them with a message that resonates with their needs;
- Invite key decision-makers;
- Come up with a sales negotiation strategy and plan;
- Take appropriate measures to avoid no-shows;
- Make use of sales scheduling software tools to help you book the sales meeting and nail the demo presentation.
Here is a list of sales automation tools to help you navigate the entire process of scheduling a demo call, help you leave an impression, and prevent human error.
Sales scheduling software #1. MeetFox
MeetFox allows you to schedule demo meetings, host video calls, and collect payments all in one place. It is a practical and easy solution to manage your business online.
Allow your leads to automatically schedule time with you based on availability in your schedule - without any back-and-forth emailing. This way you can meet, convert and serve your potential customers at the right moment - when they feel like it.
- Custom booking page (with your unique branding);
- Easy self-scheduling (scheduling button or pop up to your website, social media, or inside your email signature);
- In-browser video call (simple, no-download video call solution);
- Instant payments (set up payments & get invoice your clients automatically);
- Countless integrations.
You can streamline support calls and let new customers easily book set up calls or demos with your team. Additionally, MeetFox lets you spread the workload with collective scheduling, securely record your video calls, and automate your follow-ups with custom SMS & email reminders.
Ideal for: sales teams, customer success managers, service professionals, education organizations, HR, and recruitment.
MeetFox is powerful scheduling software that provides a comprehensive, proven, and secure way to schedule more demo meetings, while allowing sales teams to maximize their time, efficiency, and workload on closing more deals.
Sales automation tool #2. Sales.Rocks
Of course, to be able to schedule more demo meetings with your prospects, first, you’ll need to understand who they are, and how to approach them. Built on a huge B2B database, Sales.Rocks has all the valuable information sales professionals need to find, target, and personalize the messaging with their future customers.
Search and filter down your ICP through industry, departments, locations, size of their company, among 50 other data points.
Get company and contact information on your most valuable accounts, such as their names, email addresses, job titles, company’s annual revenue, the technology they use, the niche in which they operate, see all the employees in a hierarchy company’s view and easily find and reach out to the decision-makers and the buying committee.
Additional sales tools built-in Sales.Rocks software include:
- email warmer for new and mature email domains;
- drip campaigns for cold outreach on email and LinkedIn combined;
- one-liner of personalization for your email subject and opening lines;
- Email finder and email verifier;
- Bulk enrichment of your lead lists with valuable info that you’re missing
and more.
Once you know who your ideal prospects are, and everything you need to know about them to start a meaningful conversation scheduling more demo calls becomes easy. Place their company in a suitable business context for further collaboration and watch your sales increase.
Pricing: 7-day trial for €7, all features included, starting price from €700 quarterly.
Scheduling software #3. Calendly
Calendly is a fully automated scheduling tool that’s easy to use and saves time for both, you and your prospects.
Set your own availability preferences, share the link, and your prospects can choose an open slot that fits them too. Calendly syncs to your calendar of choice, and you can set different time durations (e.g., 15mins, 30mins, 1hr) so clients will have options.
One of its main features - Workflows - allows you to improve meetings attendance by scheduling event reminders and confirmations via email or SMS. You can also use Workflows to automate routine communications before and after every meeting – leaving you with more time and energy for the strategic work only you can do.
The best thing about Calendly is that you can embed it on your website to streamline scheduling, increase conversion rates, and offer a seamless customer experience!
Plus, it connects up to six business and personal calendars to automate scheduling based on real-time availability, straight from—and to—your calendar.
Pricing: Free, basic version for individuals, or the most popular, “professional” version which is $16/seat/mo for teams and companies.
Sales scheduling software #4. Chili Piper
Chili Piper is an advanced scheduling software aimed at B2B revenue teams. With its Instant Booker they make it really easy for their clients to schedule meetings with prospects. This feature can suggest available times over email or book instantly from Salesforce, Outreach, SalesLoft, and more.
It lets you use different slots as buttons placed directly in your email and let the recipients of your outreach campaign book a demo with you in just one click.
And if you’re already using Salesforce, it will automatically log events into your Salesforce dashboard. All no-shows, reschedules, and meeting details are time-stamped and recorded to help you better manage your pipeline.
Maybe the best part is its ability to send automated reminder emails before your meeting to avoid no-shows or let your potential B2B customers easily reschedule.
Here’s a testimonial from a satisfied customer: “When a lead books through Chili Piper it converts 4x what we saw before. That change is what we call the Chili Piper effect."
Pricing: Starts from $30 per user, per month and it goes up to $1000 per month for a platform fee (no matter the number of users).
Sales meeting platform #5. Demodesk
Demodesk is a sales meeting platform that helps to increase your win rates by providing additional features like coaching reps live and automating the non-selling tasks. Prospects can book a demo and schedule a call through custom booking pages and questions, and receive automated calendar invites and reminders to avoid no-shows.
During the sales meeting, you can automatically load the perfect slides, websites & speaker notes. This allows you to structure and maintain your sales narrative with playbooks tailored to each customer conversation. Besides, Demodesk had truly invested in creating the most interactive screen sharing and co-browsing experience available. This allows you to engage with customers during the demo meeting and let them interact with your product and content, without switching screens.
You can also level up your coaching by shadowing calls live and assisting reps in real-time without disrupting the sales process.
Pricing: Starter pack $25 per user per month billed annually or $45 for the PRO version. For businesses, they offer custom pricing depending on your needs.
Appointment scheduling app #6. Arrangr
Arrangr plugs right into all popular calendars (Apple, Microsoft, Google) using safe and secure industry-standard protocols and helps you
Appointment scheduling minimizes the no-show rate and helps you to plan your sales demos without overbooking, clashes, or extra stress.
SimplyMeet helps you keep up with your availability with a transparent appointment scheduling system, making it easier to manage time zones, buffer times, the details of each meeting, and your own peace of mind.
An interesting feature of SimplyMeet is that it supports over 15 different languages and many multilingual sites for appointment scheduling. You can integrate SimplyMeet.me with the other apps you’re using via Zapier or give their native Zoom and Microsoft Teams integrations a chance.
Pricing: The basic version is free forever, but limited and therefore preferred for occasional use. But if you have regular, weekly calls then the pro version is more suitable and starts at $3.99 /month.
Business phone system #7. Novocall
Novocall is a VoIP business phone system that helps you automate your inbound sales processes with their click-to-call software and reach out to your leads in under 30 seconds. Also, your leads can request an instant callback or scheduled callback from your sales team.
Novocall is smoothly integrated with Google and Outlook calendars, allowing leads to choose available call slots based on your sales reps’ availability.
Another interesting feature of Novocall is its ability to automatically assign your leads to the right sales reps based on predetermined lead routing rules. They call it “Lead distribution”. This ensures that there is a lead-to-sales rep match and creates a better experience for both, your team and your leads. The “matching” process is based on your leads’ geographical location, spoken language, or business function.
What’s more, they offer a call tracking software allowing you to know which marketing campaign has led to which inbound call? The ability to trace every call back to both online and offline campaign sources is crucial for any B2B marketer or SDR to identify and optimize the best-performing campaigns.
Pricing: 7-day free trial available, then it starts from $19 per user per month.
Sales Experience Platform #8. Walnut.io
Walnut is all about creating interactive and personalized product demos! It lets you customize your sales demos to meet your prospects' needs and brand identity - without coding. Also, you can add annotations to guide your prospects through your product with ease.
The demos are shareable! Send a link to your interactive and personalized demos to your champions so they can share them in their organization. Or collaborate together with your prospects on your sales demos and fine-tune the details together.
Additionally, with Walnut you can collect and track your prospects' clicks to understand how they use your demos and optimize them accordingly. The best part is - you can duplicate the demos and use them again to save time and scale your demo creation.
Finally, they can brag with an encapsulated environment that guarantees zero downtime and no loading time issues to present your interactive demos
Before you go: 5 best practices on how to schedule product demo appointments
In the B2B space, the sales process usually begins with a cold outreach campaign, either via cold calling or cold emailing. Nowadays, we found ways to insert LinkedIn into this mix as well, either through sending connection requests or directly sending InMail messages using LinkedIn Premium.
However, the ultimate goal of this initial stage is to schedule an assessment or discovery call with your prospect and gather as much information as possible about their pain points so you can later offer solutions aligned with your product features and services.
And what you talk about during the discovery call will dictate your sales demo flow.
*Bonus point: Another important thing to discover on this call is Who are the people on the buying committee for your target account? You’ll need to send them an invitation to the demo call as well.
#1. Schedule the demo while you’re still on the discovery call
Strike while the iron is still hot and lead the sales discussion towards the next logical step - the demo. Keep the momentum going, give them a time frame to pick a slot in your calendar - ideally within 5 business days of your call.
p.s. Don’t schedule demo meetings on Monday morning or Friday afternoons.
#2. The length of the meeting is a deciding factor
Ask for a 30-45 minute slot of their busy time. You have better chances at scheduling a shorter demo call to get the initial Yes, and if there’s a need to continue the demo, you’ll agree on that on the spot. According to data research by Gong.io, successful sales demos are 30.5% longer than unsuccessful demo calls (47 minutes versus 36 minutes).
#3. Send a scheduling email
If you don’t manage to book the demo on your disco call, then it’s time to send a scheduling email making it easy for your prospects to pick a date and time that works for them.
Timing is everything. Prepare a scheduling email template in advance, so you can fill in any last-minute details from the discovery call and send it to them within 15 minutes after the call.
Here’s where your scheduling software comes in! Include a booking link in your email from your scheduling software where they can see the available slots and schedule the demo without the need to respond to emails back-n-forth.
Or offer them three different time slots to choose from with a single click on one of the options.
#4. Invite the buying committee to the demo
At this point, you’ve qualified your buyers and understood who the key decision-makers are. Have they RSVP’d to the demo?
Vet the committee members! The more you know about them and what they are seeking, the more prepared you will be.
Make sure you have at least one major stakeholder participate in the demo meeting.
And let them know that you will have members on your team attending specifically to answer the questions posed by that stakeholder.
e.g. If the decision-maker is concerned with highly technical questions, you can bring your customer success manager to speak about how current customers overcome them or the CTO to speak to the more technical aspects of the demo.
#5. Take appropriate measures to avoid no-shows
While it’s impossible to avoid them 100% of the time, no-show rates decrease when appropriate reminder emails are sent.
A demo scheduling software will allow you to send different types of reminders to the attendees automatically based on custom rules,
e.g. Send an email or an SMS reminder one day (24 hours) or 20 minutes before the demo, depending on whether your prospect has accepted the meeting or not. This type of email customization can improve response rates by over 32% from emails that are not personalized.
About The Author
Ivana Drakulevska, an SEO specialist at Sales.Rocks and B2B SaaS content writer looking to learn new things as she is exploring the online universe. While on Earth, she is a supporter of green politics and environmental responsibility.
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