How to Fill Your Business Calendar with Client Appointments (without advertising!)

Keeping your calendar filled with client appointments is arguably the No. 1 activity to create and maintain momentum for your business. 

Why?

Because when you are talking with new clients, you’re growing your business. And when you’re talking with existing clients, you’re deepening relationships and uncovering additional opportunities to provide value.

In the corporate world, entire departments are dedicated to reviewing pipelines and forecasts to ensure that new opportunities are constantly being nurtured. But in smaller businesses, that job rests squarely on just a few people and might even rest solely on your shoulders. 

So without a sales force or a huge ad budget, what’s a smaller business supposed to do?

With a few actionable strategies and the right mindset, keeping that calendar full of client meetings is possible. And it is possible even without advertising.

Start by Examining Your Current Booking System

GoReminders user friendly interface and automated scheduling and reminders streamline booking processes, saving your business time and money.

Don’t worry if upon reading that first header, you wondered, “what booking system?” You are certainly not alone.

A system is really just the list of steps you take to ensure new business is being funneled toward your company. Don’t overthink it.

The system should be:

• Easy to repeat
• Designed to enable your business to accomplish its goals

Whether you’re creating a system or evaluating an existing system, an important question to ask is this:

Is my system for booking client meetings aligned with what I want to accomplish?

Example: If you’re looking to refine and narrow your target audience in order to improve conversions, your booking system should include qualifying a prospect before allowing them to book a meeting with you. But if your goal is to gather additional market research for the next 3 months, then you’re not going to be as particular about with whom you are speaking.

Take a Look at Your Habits

Establish efficient booking habits that help your business grow using GoReminders.

Often we do the work to build a system, but then our habits simply don’t support that system.

Therefore, the next step is to perform an honest self-assessment. Ask some hard questions, like:

Are your habits helping or hurting the current system you have in place?

When you’ve taken the time to review and refine a system to funnel more client meetings into your business, it’s important to recognize just how important your habits and following through can be. 

Example: Instead of “following up” with prospects or current clients about meetings whenever you have “extra” time, choose a specific day of the week as “follow-up day”. Then stick to it.

Consider Automating the Follow Up Process

Here is another question for you:

How efficient is your current follow-up process?

If you’re spending time shuffling through papers or scrolling through DIY excel spreadsheets to figure out which prospects or current clients you should contact for a meeting, you know deep down that you’re not operating in an efficient way.

For client meetings to be productive, you’ve got to have the right information and meet with the right person at the right time. But none of that can happen if you aren’t efficient in how you operate.

One way to instantly drive efficiency is through automated communication. Automation can make it easy for you to effectively communicate with prospects and current clients. 

Examples: Automating communication can be as simple as an email or text blast. 

Or it can be as intricate as in the following example. Your website can have a contact form where visitors request a consultation. Those visitors are then sent to a calendar page. 

Those who sign up are sent an automated confirmation and reminder messages as the consultation approaches. 

But what about those who don’t sign up? Automation enables you to track anyone who doesn’t sign up on the calendar page. In 30 minutes or so, the automated system sends out a calendar reminder to book the consultation. From there, you can determine how many additional times to follow up before giving up that lead or at least putting it to the side for now.