Client-Facing Playbook

Are you in a client-facing role? Do you get frustrated at trying to find time to speak to all the people you need to? We know how much of a problem that can be, that is why Doodle is here to help. 

In our Client Facing Playbook, we aim to set out the challenges you face and how you can overcome them.

The major scheduling challenges 

“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.” - Michael LeBoeuf, best-selling author and management professor.

The term “client-facing” describes a vast range of professionals and sectors. This includes recruitment and talent acquisition managers, financial advisors, technology and solution sales, realtors, consultants and account managers.

All of these roles face very similar problems when it comes to meetings.

• The never-ending email back and forth. Most companies still rely on time-consuming and non-automated methods of getting meetings into the books, such as haphazard calling by phone or, worse still, the eternal game of email ping pong. Not only is this manual approach to scheduling slow, the constant switching between tasks, like checking schedules and sending emails about availability while trying to research new business opportunities, can make employees a whopping 80 percent less productive.

• Meeting people across time zones. While multinationals are already accustomed to the disruption of working across multiple countries, continents and time zones, it’s increasingly a  challenge that even small and medium-sized companies have to face due to trends, such as the rise of the remote workforce and the gig economy.

• Getting the right people at the right time. One-third of professionals believe that their company is negatively impacted by the relevant people being absent from meetings. Not having all the key stakeholders and decision-makers in the room can slow down significant projects, impacting your client experience and your ability to create value for your clients.

• Too many bad meetings. The American economist Thomas Sowell once commented, “People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.”

According to our State of Meetings Report, around 70 percent of busy professionals in the US, UK and Germany believe that bad meetings cost them valuable time. For 89 percent of respondents, poor organization is the cause of the issue. Too many meetings lack a concrete agenda, while most pre-reads tend to get read during the first 30 minutes of the actual meeting.

How automating the process helps 

There are a number of benefits from using a scheduler like Doodle to automate how you organize your meetings. 

• The early bird catches the worm. A decade ago, a study published in the Harvard Business Review highlighted the importance of the one-hour sales rule. When a salesperson contacts a prospect within one hour of their first contact, they are 60 times more likely to turn the opportunity into a customer than if they waited a full 24 hours before following up.  In the decade since the one-hour rule has become the five-minute rule. If you contact a new lead within five minutes, you are 100 times more likely to reach them and 21 times more likely to successfully qualify them than if you leave it just 30 minutes. 

• An incredible 78 percent of customers buy from the company responding to their interest first.

• Build better relationships. It’s five times cheaper to retain a current client than to attract a new one, so focus on nurturing existing clients at all times. The main reasons why clients sever ties with their current agency, firm or supplier almost always boils down to the relationship: they feel neglected, there’s a lack of trust, there’s a sense of apathy towards your company or service, or they don’t feel a positive human connection. If there’s one way to make clients feel utterly unvalued, it’s to make it impossible for them to find a convenient slot for meetings with you and your team. 

Using an automated meeting process enables the creation of custom calendars, whereby you can share your availability with clients and allow them to schedule time whenever they need it. This makes them feel special and removes the scheduling burden from your team.

How Doodle Features can help

Booking Page

Our Booking Page is essentially a unique personalized calendar with appointment slots pre-populated according to your predetermined rules. Doodle creates a unique URL for you to share. Anyone with that link can book time in your schedule without any effort on your part, making it a game-changer for client-facing professionals with a high volume of client meetings.

Doodle 1:1s

A great tool for recruiters. Create a 1:1 meeting with a range of possible meeting times and send it to your guest via email or a specific URL. Doodle integrates with your calendar and meetings sync automatically, ensuring you’re always sharing your real-time availability. As guests select their slot, it gets blocked into your schedule and is no longer offered as an option to other invitees to avoid conflicts. 

Doodle Groups

Doodle Groups is one of the most used features because it does away with the endless back-and-forth of emails. It comes into its own when you’re looking to organize things like client pitches, quarterly deep-dives, brainstorming sessions and department gatherings. What used to take 30 emails and 30 days can now be achieved in minutes.

What’s more, it also brings an end to those time-zone headaches. Doodle auto-identifies guests’ local time zones and displays options in their local time, which is especially useful for companies with multiple locations or remote employees.

You can find even more about what Doodle can do for you in the full report attached to this page.