Foundation for Marketing Success – Shared Calendars

What if your marketer could anticipate sales presentations or meetings and support your sales team with the tools they need when they need them?  What if your marketer came to you with new sales opportunities anticipating a group of customers in need?  That’s the real value of marketing – hearing from customers and identifying new business opportunities.  That’s what marketers want to be able to do.

I recently suggested to a client that they should start sharing their calendar with the office team so that they can be more supportive.  One of his objections was that he didn’t keep track of his calendar in a ‘sharable’ way.  The other objection was that he didn’t see value in sharing his calendar with anyone in his office.

When you’re the only person on the sales team or you’re the owner who handles all the sales in a company, you’re doing your thing on your own schedule.  When you bring in a marketer to support the sales process or look for new opportunities, you probably didn’t include mind-reading in your job description. Marketers can support sales more effectively when they know what’s going on – when they’re part of the team.

In the case of our client, if the company’s marketer could see when the owner would be on the road, they could plan to do some marketing in the community before the owner arrived.  Paving the way of a visit can turn a cold call into a warm call.  When the sales team is preparing for a webinar, conference, or trade show, a marketer who knows the event dates and details, can post blogs and social ads that bring awareness to an issue or your company’s solution.

As your team grows, sharing calendars is an important part of becoming a team but there are some aspects of sharing calendars that people are uncomfortable with.

• I don’t want people to see my personal commitments. Most calendars will allow you to create entries that are simply marked “Busy” for those personal appointments.
• My calendar changes so much, I can’t keep a calendar up to date. Most calendars have apps that you can update with a few quick taps. Keeping your team informed about your work and commitments will help everyone support you more effectively – especially if you spend a lot of time out of the office.  You can always find time to update your calendar if it’s a priority.
• I don’t want to learn another online tool. Maybe, sharing calendars starts by posting a large calendar in a common area.  Maybe you take a photo of your paper calendar and share it with everyone on your team. If your team is small now, find a platform that fits with your internal networks. That way, as you grow, you’ll already have tools to quickly bring them into your team. Young people are very familiar with using online tools for collaboration so maybe they can find the best solution for your team

 This may sound like just another thing to add to your long To Do list. Yes, it’s another thing to keep current and it can seem like a time suck.  It will be a big investment – for a while.  I guarantee, once you get in the habit of using a shared calendar, you will wonder what you ever did without it. Consider it a ‘growing pain’ – if your business weren’t growing, you wouldn’t have growing pains.