TimeBridge Makes Scheduling Sales Meetings Easy

If you’ve ever tried scheduling a follow-up sales meeting with multiple attendees, you know what a hassle it is to get everyone coordinated.

The last time I went through that particular exercise, I ended up with a deep respect and appreciation for those who frequently take on the daunting task of putting the schedules of busy business people together.

Scheduling a meeting and sharing calendars through Outlook is relatively easy – but that only works if all attendees use Outlook and are on the same company network. Google Calendar is slick, but is unfortunately not used as often in corporate environments.

The result is that it can easily take hours to arrange a simple conference call, with email, voicemail, callbacks and confirmations. Not only is it busywork you could really do without, it also can take weeks before that important customer meeting finally takes place. Business is on hold and you’re at serious risk of losing momentum during the sales cycle.

TimeBridge, a personal scheduling manager that helps busy professionals find a time to meet, claims to have solved this problem for good.

TimeBridge doesn’t replace your calendar, it adds smart scheduling features to it. If you use Outlook or Google Calendar today, you’ll find that TimeBridge blends in seamlessly.

Here’s how it works.

As a meeting organizer, you log in to TimeBridge (free registration required) and identify your desired meeting attendees. Attendees from previous meetings will be remembered and TimeBridge offers integration with your Outlook or Gmail Contacts so you can select them from an existing address book as well.

Next, you’ll pick 5 potential dates and times for your sales meeting. This will give potential attendees a way to pick the slot that works best for them. TimeBridge takes care of sending the invitation with the 5 meeting options to all meeting attendees.

What we liked about TimeBridge is that it gives you full control over the outgoing meeting invitation. You can customize the subject and body of the invitation email and TimeBridge shows you exactly what your email will look like when your prospects and customers receive it. You’ll stay in full control of the messaging to your prospects and clients.

As soon as the invite has been sent, TimeBridge’s magic kicks in.

As a potential meeting attendee, you will now receive an email with the 5 meeting options the meeting organizer created. For each date and time, you can assign a „best”, „yes” or „no” label and when TimeBridge notices that there’s a time and date that works for all attendees, you can let TimeBridge automatically schedule and confirm the meeting.

TimeBridge ensures that the final meeting date and time, as well as the meeting information (location, dial-in # etc) make their way to the inbox of all attendees. Fully automatic, without any work or manual intervention. It’s important to know that meeting attendees do not need a TimeBridge registration in order to see and accept your meeting invitation. It’ll work for anyone, registered or not, for any kind of meeting and in any part of the world.

More frequent meeting attendees may want to consider registering for free as it unlocks powerful calendar sharing features. It’ll make the scheduling process even easier.

TimeBridge claims to make scheduling meetings much easier and we think they do a great job at that. But in addition, we found another element of the service particularly interesting to people in a sales role. It’s called Time Brokering.

Let’s assume you have a road trip planned with your manager or a technical support resource. It goes without saying that you want to make sure your day is planned effectively. Yet, after all the hassle of scheduling and changing meetings – your day often looks like swiss cheese and you spend more time at Starbucks than in front of customers. I’m sure you could think of a better way to impress your new VP of Sales.

Here’s the trick. TimeBridge lets you schedule multiple tentative appointments for the same timeslot. Let’s say you’re scheduling your first meeting at 9AM and you want to make sure you’re actually seeing someone at that time. What you would do is schedule 3 potential meetings for 9AM, offer time alternatives for each meeting and send out the invites.

If one of your potential meetings is confirmed for 9AM, the time will appear as „unavailable” to any of the other meetings proposed for that slot. But since you gave 5 time options for each meeting, possible attendees can now simply pick one of the other 4 available options. Your calendar stays effortlessly up to date and you stay productive and in control.

What a great way to keep a full appointment schedule on a traveling day!

At the time of writing, TimeBridge is in beta but if you’re a busy sales professional, manager or business owner with frequent face-to-face or online meetings, you should really take a closer look at this service and sign up for a free account.

We found it to be a true time saver.