Introducing team meetings: bringing round robin scheduling to Outreach

Meetings are the most critical element of any customer-facing rep's day. And yet, there's a definite science to scheduling them well across your team. It's critical that when a prospect wants to meet with a rep from your sales team, they're able to book a meeting easily and get on the phone as quickly as possible. But managers have to balance this with ensuring that reps are being treated fairly and getting the same number of meetings. The resulting logistics that go into scheduling across your team is more terrifyingly complex than your budget spreadsheet.

Today, we're releasing Team Meetings for Outreach to combat these scheduling pain points. Team Meetings will increase booked meetings and simplify meeting handoffs to deliver a seamless customer experience, while strategically and fairly distributing meetings across all of your reps with no manual effort. With Round Robin scheduling capabilities, customizable based on meeting types, reps can spend less time on the administrative work of scheduling meetings across the team while giving prospects a much better experience.

Team Meetings will make scheduling more efficient for inbound and outbound teams alike. With Team Meetings in Outreach, you can:

• Create a seamless scheduling and handoff experience for prospects. Team meetings automates the meeting handoff, letting reps focus less on process and more on delivering a best-in-class experience to prospects and customers. With flexible Round Robin scheduling, prospects will have more meeting options across multiple reps’ availability and can pick a time to meet based on their own schedule and preferences.
• Fairly distribute meetings among the reps on your team. Round Robin scheduling will eliminate rep bias by evenly distributing meetings based on specific meeting types and distribution rules. Customizable meeting types ensure that reps can still specialize within teams. You can create meeting types to group reps based on their location and time zone, their expertise in a certain vertical, or specialization across different market segments (like having reps grouped by mid-market vs enterprise, or grouped by region).
• Let inbound prospects book meetings with your reps instantly. You can use Team Meetings to create public calendar links with round robin scheduling. Now, instead of filling out a contact form, prospects can book meetings instantly, which ensures they get the quick service they need and you capitalize on your hottest leads when they're most interested. This also works for support and success teams, allowing existing customers to book time with an available rep to ask a question or resolve an issue.

This is a critical feature set for account-based revenue teams who have to balance handoffs from sales development to account executives and then again from account executives to customer success and account managers. It's hard to manually manage meeting handoffs, because a lot of the time reps are actually scheduling the next meeting while they have their prospect on the phone.

Before Team Meetings, this multitasking led to mistakes when scheduling follow up meetings, and awkward interactions as reps balanced scheduling logistics with carrying on meaningful customer conversations. Now, reps can book the next meeting for a prospect in one click and focus their attention on hearing and empathizing with their prospect’s pains and helping them find a solution.

Additionally, it’s hard for reps to manually handoff meetings to other reps without bias, and an automated solution like Team Meetings helps reps hand off meetings fairly and in the most efficient way possible. When you can create an even playing field for your reps, you can better identify and reward your top performers.

Team Meetings will allow both strict and flexible Round Robin scheduling. When setting up your meeting types, you have the flexibility to choose whether to optimize for even distribution of meetings across reps (strict round robin) or for maximum availability (flexible round robin).

With Team Meetings, everybody wins. Teams will spend less time on the complexities of scheduling high volumes of meetings, reps have a fair and level playing field so managers can more accurately acknowledge top performers, and customers can schedule meetings on their terms and get connected with an available rep faster.