Sales meetings – online or offline – is a very, very expensive use of time, both for seller and buyer. In order to be respectful of the buyer’s time, the seller must do proper preparation in advance of the meeting. That’s why we need to recover lost sales time with automated sales meeting personalization.

Proper preparation for each sales meeting increases quality and conversion rates through the better conversations a prepared Sales Professional can have. An improved visual experience makes for more engaged clients, who enjoy the process significantly more.

What will you get out of reading this?: You will know how precisely to set up automatically personalized slides for any meeting scheduled through Calendly. At the bottom you’ll find a link to the precise recipe, so you can easily set it up on your own.

Why Sales Time is Lost without Automated Sales Meeting Personalization

Most companies still rely on mostly manual actions in their sales meeting planning. They may have a process for sales meeting planning, and have even set time aside between meetings to ensure this planning takes place.

Still, for many of those manual actions there’s an automated alternative. Proper use of automation ensures that the planning – and sales meetings – becomes more effective as well as more efficient.

In this post we’ll go through automation, which makes any slides you bring into a meeting personalized to the client, takes less time to prepare and with consistent quality.

What we set out to achieve here is to be able to have an online or offline sales meeting using content, which is personalized and provide for an experience, which is more tailored to the individual client.

We’ll get to that in a minute. First a little on our setup.

Use Smart Scheduling to Gain Insights

It all starts with scheduling. In the current age of course we’ll be putting smart scheduling to good use to recover lost sales time and automated sales meeting preparation.

Smart scheduling enables the client to pick a time, which works for them. In addition, you have the opportunity to ask a few questions during scheduling. The answers to these questions become data, which you can use for your automated preparation.

In our case we’ve been looking at A LOT of smart scheduling software over the years. Calendly is our favorite smart scheduling tool – it simply has more muscle than the vast majority of their competitors.

Calendly also have their own ideas on smarter workflows, which you can have a look at here. The workflows feature requires upgrading to their Pro plan, where this recipe for sales planning only requires Premium.

Get Your Slides Ready for Personalization

In order for us to have our story and the meeting experience be supported by visuals, most Sales Professionals will want to make use of some sort of presentation tool.

Similar to smart scheduling you can choose between a number of presentation software offerings. Most will be well-known – like Microsoft Powerpoint or Apple Keynote. Those two lack the power of integration, though, so we will have to look further.

The only two apps with easy integration options available are Showpad as well as Google Slides. With no access to a paid Showpad account, and with Google Slides ready that choice was pretty simple: We’ll be using the Google Slides as included in our Google Workspaces environment.

Make sure you have your favorite slidedeck ready as a template in Google Slides. We will use it as the base for all future personalized presentations.

Integrate to Recover Lost Sales Time

In our case Calendly’s own automation won’t be nearly enough. We need to connect with Google Slides and send information back and forth between Calendly and Slides. This will contribute to personalizing the sales meeting content without losing too much sales time.

Over the past decade several companies have launched offerings that integrate various pieces of software. For our specific use case the most obvious offerings are from Zapier and Make (formerly known as Integromat). They’re the only ones that have the required integrations out of the box.

After a quick bit of setting things up both offerings are ready for the heavy lifting. We have a Zapier account already, so we’ll continue to use that, although Integromat seems to be able to get this project off the ground as well. If you’re an Integromat-fan this integration will work for you as well.

Final Clean-up

The last bit of house-keeping is to move all presentations to move the newly created personalized slides out of the main Google Drive folder and into a single folder which will continue all personalized presentations.

Getting Set Up for Fully Automated Personalization

All the software is in place. We’re set for the last sprint to finally recover lost sales time with automated sales meeting personalization.

You’ve got a presentation template in Google Slides and created a folder where all slides should be created.

A Calendly meeting type set up on at least a Premium Calendly account.

Zapier is ready for the setup.

And here’s your Zap.

All you now need to do is connect the appropriate accounts with Zapier, make sure you’re asking for information in your Calendly meeting, which you intent to use in the Google Slides deck.

In the Slides deck make sure to create variables for those pieces of information. They look like this, for instance:

• {{email}}
• {{company_name}}
• {{full_name}}
• {{first_name}}
• {{website}}
• {{your_goal}}

Your own creativity really is the limitation in this setup. The aim is to make the sales meeting as relevant, engaging, and personal as possible, while not spending oceans of time on preparation.

Comment here if you have questions or suggestions.

Have fun setting it up – and good selling.