4 tips for more effective sales meetings with Outreach

Posted December 20, 2017

By Chelsey Feldman

Product Marketing at Outreach

Meetings are the core to any sales team’s success - but 20% of booked sales meetings fail because a prospect cancels or forgets to show up. How you schedule and manage your meetings, and the tools you use make a huge difference in your no-show rate, as well as the meetings you do hold, are more likely to convert.

These problems are why we created Outreach Meetings. Let’s look at 4 ways your team can use Outreach to have more effective sales meetings, follow up better, and keep prospects more engaged. Outreach Meetings, along with our sales meeting tips, are sure to set you up for success.

1. Give prospects control of the calendar so they can have the ability to book time that works for them -- without any back and forth.

Outreach lets you send your public calendar link directly to prospects, allowing them to choose a time that works well and book a meeting directly on your calendar.

This eliminates the hassle of back and forth scheduling and reduces the likelihood of no shows by allowing your meetings to take place sooner.

Did you know: meetings that occur within 7 days of your original conversation are more likely to take place?

Outreach Meetings also allows your prospects to reschedule with one click, using your most up to date calendar information.

Plus, if you don’t want to share your whole calendar, you can insert specific available meeting times into your email using natural language. Your prospects can still use these links to book time with you with only one click.

2. Simplify team scheduling by allowing sales reps to book time on behalf of account executives, directly on their calendars.

Prospects aren’t the only people you’ll waste time with going back and forth on schedules - this can often be an internal problem between sales representatives and account executives, making the meeting hand off that much more difficult. Outreach lets you manage multiple schedules with the ability to book meetings on behalf of a colleague, simplifying the hand off between SDRs and AEs, and ensuring that promising meetings are never missed.

3. Never miss a meeting follow up with sequences and email templates designed to help you keep prospects engaged after a meeting.

Immediately after your meeting, add your prospect to a follow up sequence to ensure they don’t go dark. If you don’t receive a reply to your initial email, the sequence can schedule call tasks and a mix of automatic and manual follow up emails to help you stay on top of your communications.

Start this sequence with a recap email, summarizing your conversation and the next steps you discussed. Pro tip: Rather than recreating this email from scratch every time, use Outreach’s meeting recap email blueprint, which allows you to customize the important details of your meeting without worrying about how to structure the note.

4. Re-engage no shows with follow up sequences.

Follow ups aren’t just for meetings that have been held - follow up sequences can also be your secret weapon to re-engaging meeting no-shows. Outreach has a blueprint sequence specifically for meeting follow ups. We compiled data from tens of thousands of calls and emails to determine the best touch points at the best times. With this sequence, Outreach does the heavy lifting of following up -- all you have to do is personalize!


Outreach isn’t just a fully integrated platform to help you book more effective sales meetings; it also helps you schedule, hold, and follow up on meetings more efficiently. These tips will help you simplify the way you schedule and manage meetings while ensuring more meetings actually happen.


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