Bring groups together faster with team scheduling options

Business growth requires meetings — and lots of them. But aligning everyone's schedules to find a time to meet can be complicated and time-consuming.

Calendly’s team scheduling features bring teams together for more productive, collaborative meetings and fewer scheduling headaches. The Round Robin, Collective, and Group Event Types help make sure everyone who needs to be in a meeting is there, at a time that works for everyone involved.

Team scheduling with Calendly makes it easy to bring together ...

• Sales, marketing, and customer success collaborating on a deal

• Recruiting, HR, and hiring panels interviewing candidates to fill roles

• Customer support, IT, and engineering teams resolving customer issues

• Higher education admissions and enrollment teams organizing tours

… just to name a few!

To learn more about Calendly’s team scheduling features, let’s walk through how revenue teams use each team scheduling option to take a deal from prospect to onboarded customer.

Round Robin: Distribute one-on-one meetings across your team

Let’s start with a prospect. They’ve done their research and are ready to speak to a sales rep to get more information about your product, so they fill out a “Contact us” form on your website.

With Calendly, you can book meetings with prospects on the spot. After the prospect fills out your contact form, you send them right to your sales team’s scheduling page. They book the meeting time that works best for them, and the Round Robin Event Type automatically pairs them with the next available sales rep.

How do Round Robin meetings work?

Round Robin scheduling automatically distributes new meetings to team members, saving you the time of manually assigning them.

You choose which team members the Event Type can be assigned to. Calendly looks at the availability of every team member and assigns the meeting to a rotating host based on customizable event logic:

• Optimize for availability: Assign the meeting to the next available person to reduce wait times.

• Set team member priorities: When more than one person is available, you can prioritize which team member will take the meeting.

• Optimize for equal distribution: Spread meetings evenly among team members to avoid overloading one person.

Round Robin meetings let sales teams respond to meeting requests faster and hold those initial sales calls sooner. If priorities change after a meeting is booked, admins can switch meeting assignments between team members without changing the time selected by the prospect.

Learn more about how to set up a Round Robin meeting in this help center article.

Availability: Round Robin Event Types are available on the Teams plan and above.

Hot tip: What if someone fills out your form but isn’t a great fit? Use Calendly Routing to prevent your sales team from wasting time on unqualified leads. Instead of sending prospects to a booking page, you can show them a custom message with next steps, ask for more information, or redirect them to a specific URL. 

Collective meetings: Co-host a meeting at a time that works for everyone

Back to our sales cycle example:

During the initial sales call, your sales rep learns the prospect's company is a great fit. The prospect likes what they learned and wants to see your product in action! This calls for more specific expertise, so the sales rep uses a Collective Event Type to set up a demo with the prospect, co-hosted by an account executive and sales engineer.

Collective scheduling only shows the prospect times when both co-hosts can meet. The prospect chooses the best time for them, and Calendly adds the meeting to everyone’s calendar. The account executive and sales engineer are able to host a product demo and answer all of the prospect’s questions — all within a few days of that first sales call.

The prospect decides the solution meets their company’s needs, and is ready to make a deal! The account executive uses another Collective Event Type to set up a meeting co-hosted with the legal team to finalize the contract.

How do Collective meetings work?

When you need multiple team members to co-host a meeting, it’s time for a Collective Event Type. Collective meetings pool the availability of everyone in a group, so the invitee — in our example, the prospective customer — can only select meeting times that are open on every host’s calendar.

You can create separate Collective Event Types for each combination of meeting co-hosts. 

Beyond our sales example, use cases include:

• Status meetings between a marketing agency and internal decision-makers

• Panel interviews with one job candidate and multiple interviewers

• Troubleshooting calls connecting technicians and engineers with a customer

• Specialized user training involving one user and multiple customer success managers 

Availability: Collective Event Types are available on the Professional plan and above. 

Learn more about how to set up a Collective meeting in this help center article.  

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Group meetings: Your best choice for webinars and trainings

Your relationship with the customer doesn’t end once you close the deal. It’s time to start onboarding users. Your new customer has a few hundred employees to train, and as a hybrid workforce, they’re spread across time zones. Scheduling the training sessions could be a huge headache.

With Calendly’s Group Event Types, the onboarding team sets up several training sessions that multiple people can attend at the same time. The sessions are available at various times and days, so new users have plenty of opportunities to choose a time that works for their schedule.

The onboarding team also limits the number of attendees in each session, so attendees can ask questions and interact with the trainer. By the end of the first month, all employees have been onboarded to your product without interrupting their day-to-day work.

How do Group meetings work?

Calendly's Group Event Types let multiple people sign up to meet with you at once. They give you the flexibility to offer multiple meeting time options, so people can get the information they need at a time that fits their schedule.

Use cases include:

• Customer success teams hosting training sessions for large audiences

• Marketers hosting webinars

• School admissions teams offering campus tour slots 

Group Event Types also make it easier to run effective, engaging meetings. When a meeting gets overcrowded, it can be hard to answer everyone's questions. Group meetings let you limit the number of people who can attend each session, so everyone has a chance to interact with the host. There's also no need to manage each session's availability manually. Each Group meeting remains open and visible on the scheduling page until all spots are filled.

Availability: Group Event Types are available on the Essentials plan and above.

Learn more about how to set up Group meetings in this help center article.

Find the best time for one-off group meetings with Meeting Polls

The team scheduling options we’ve discussed so far — Round Robin, Group, and Collective events — work great for meeting types you’ll use regularly, like sales calls and demos. What if you need to schedule a one-off group meeting, like a call with multiple stakeholders or a working session with the whole team?

Calendly’s Meeting Polls feature is the easiest way to schedule one-time meetings with multiple people. Your invitees vote on preferred times, so you can easily accommodate personal preferences and time zones when scheduling with multiple people. 

Here’s how it works:

1. You create your meeting details and offer times to meet.

2. People vote on their preferred times.

3. You choose the best time, and Calendly schedules the meeting for you.

You can select up to nine co-hosts and invite up to 40 people to vote on a meeting time.

As the votes come in, Calendly shows the most popular times, and the host can book the meeting directly from the poll results. Calendly automatically sends calendar invites and meeting details to everyone who voted. And if any invitees didn't vote before the meeting was scheduled, you can add them while booking, so no must-have attendees get left out.

Availability: Meeting Polls are available on all Calendly plans.

Learn more about setting up Meeting Polls in this help center article.

Work better together with team scheduling

It takes countless combinations of collaborators and many different types of meetings to grow your business. With Calendly’s team scheduling features, you can book the right meetings with the right people at the right times — so your team can close more deals, retain more customers, and get more done.

Try Round Robin, Collective, and Group Event Types today to see how they help your organization grow.