How to use the Pipedrive Meeting Scheduler

Hi there, welcome back to the channel.

And today we’re going to talk about a little known feature inside PipeDrive. And I say little known because a client came to me a few days ago and said I didn’t know that this feature existed. So we’re going to talk about the PipeDrive Scheduler and the key is in the name because it allows you to schedule meetings. So if you’re familiar with something like Calendly and the appointment setting system, this is PipeDrive’s version of Calendly. Now if you’re a Calendly user already and you use it for some of the paid features, so for example booking meetings and paying for those meetings, then you might not want to consider this PipeDrive because it doesn’t have that payment piece to it. However, if you’re just booking meetings with potential clients, for example, this functionality is available across all of the paid packages.

Now I should point out that the meeting scheduler is available in the deal functionality, but it’s not available in the lead functionality, so just bear that in mind when you think about using this in your particular workflow. So the PipeDrive Scheduler does need some initial configuration to connect it to your calendar, to connect it to your preferred meeting system, so Zoom or MS Teams, whatever you prefer to use. All of the main players are available in terms of integration. So let’s take a look first at the configuration and then we’ll take a look at how you use the functionality. So the first thing that we need to do is synchronize our calendar to PipeDrive. And we can see here in the menu we’ve got Calendar Sync. And essentially I have mine already set up, but it will ask you for your account. And this works with a number of account types. I have Google, as you can see here. You have the option to select which calendar you’re using if you’re using multiple calendars. And then also one-way or two-way sync. I have mine set up as one-way. I only have PipeDrive synchronizing the activities to my calendar and not the other way around. I think this is really personal preference. And then there’s a bunch of options in terms of what do you want to sync to your calendar. I’ve just left it by default and synced everything. And I don’t include the deal and contact information because again if you have shared calendars you might not want to share that quite detailed information. So let’s look at the meeting scheduler in action. So here I have a sample deal. And we can see here, and I think quite a lot of people miss this. The meeting scheduler is part of the options available at the top above the note in a deal. So if you click on Meeting Scheduler, the first thing that we want to do is manage our availability. And you can set blocks of time. So this is the default. The default is set to an hour. I always find that a little bit too long. And you can specify a period of time between now until an end date in the future. As we can see here, I’ve got mine set up again by default between 9 and 5, Monday to Friday. There’s also an option to put in buffers before events. So you might want to have breaks in between calls. So you might want to set a buffer of 15 minutes for a comfort break rather than have end to end to end to end meetings, which is not necessarily the most productive way to do things. And then you’ve got this option to choose a starting time every 15 minutes or every hour or every 30 minutes. Again, personal preference. The shortest notice to book, I tend to set mine by a day in advance. I hate surprises in terms of meetings coming up on the same day. So I set mine normally for one day in advance. And someone can book up to six months in advance. Again, personal preference in terms of how long you want to set that into the future. And then we can go into the meeting details. And so I could set a meeting. I’ll call it a sales meeting. Location. I don’t use. And then we’ll need to set up our video call integration. It gives the three options here. I prefer Zoom. I find this always a terrible echo on Google Meet and I’m not a lover of Microsoft. So I tend to go to the Zoom meeting. I’m not going to click on this because essentially ask you to open that particular application. It’ll ask you to log in and synchronize pretty straightforward. You can add in a description for your call and that will be presented to the invitees. You can change the company name quite. I would want to do that. I’m not sure. And then the required fields for the individual to fill in. I like to add a question. I try to avoid the time wasters. And I find that just putting in this what would you like to discuss is a good way to help avoid that. You can add multiple fields. You can add footers and so on and so forth. And there’s also the option to add notes to each of the scheduled meetings. So that’s only visible to you. So really this is about personal preference, particularly around the selection of the calls themselves, the call types themselves, but pretty straightforward really and lots and lots of options in the invite fields. And this is where it gets interesting. So it will then give you some options so you can either share this particular meeting as a link. So you can put a link in your emails or you can paste it in messenger or whatever, or you can embed this on your website. So if we just used the link and paste the link into email or messenger or whatever, the link will take us to this page. So you can see that I’m inviting you to this particular meeting. It’s 45 minutes long. You can get to choose the days that I’ve given you and then you can choose the time. And essentially your user would then put in their details, the email address and they will get a confirmation. Phone is optional and my input and then here’s this question, you know, what would you like to discuss? And then all they do is click confirm booking and it will synchronize it in their calendar and it will synchronize it in your calendar also. So pretty useful, very, very similar to the calendar functionality. There is also the option to share or embed this on your website. It gives you, it’s within an iframe so it’s not a perfect solution. But the code is here. So you can just copy that code to your clipboard and then within your website, this is a WordPress website, I’ve just put this in the code section within the page. This is center formatted. You could resize this. It does look slightly different, depending on the width. But you can also select the dates and the times and then enter your information as I showed previously and then click on the confirm booking. So there is a way to embed this into your website if you want something that’s a bit more permanent. So the other option within the meeting schedule is to offer specific times to a client. So let’s potentially look at next week and let’s put a slot in here, a slot in here and a slot in here. So I want to be able to offer my client three options. I can set up the same thing so I can choose my preferred method to communicate and add in so that it’s the same as previous. But this time in the options, I can share this as a link and when I add this within any form of communication, I get this on the pipe drive web page. And I can choose my selected times here that are available that I’ve highlighted. So I’m going to choose this one again, enter the information and confirm the booking. So that’s an option of being online. I can also embed this in an email. So I can copy this to the clipboard. Then I can go to my email and I can paste this within the email and it produces this kind of lovely option here embedded within the email itself. This is Gmail or Google Workspace. It also works the same way in Outlook. So you can use pretty much any of the standard email clients. So when your client receives this email, they can select the time because I haven’t sent this yet. It doesn’t give me the options to click on these, but it will open up the meeting in browser and I can choose the meeting as before. So a kind of neat way to add it into your email.
So that’s an overview of the pipe drive scheduler.

If you don’t have pipe drive and you want to try it out for yourself along with the scheduler, there’s a link in the description below which will give you an extended trial. Normally it’s only 14 days. If you use this link, it will give you 30 days so you can try it out for an extended period.

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