How Appointlet Helped Drive 100% More Sales

scheduling made easy

Success! On September 10th, I launched an email campaign targeting employees of large public organizations.

In 17 days, I have booked 207 one-on-one appointments for just one of my partners who works in the life insurance and annuities industry. The average number of appointments scheduled in this field is about 1 per week. Our success means he is booked with an average of 5 per day for the next 2 months already.

He initially told me to launch the campaign and let people respond via email or a basic form on a website that let them choose any time or day. Within 2 days, scheduling was out of control just in terms of trying to retype their information into Google Calendar and then with people requesting the same day and times. Furthermore, we could see that if we had to send reminders or confirmations, there was no way that this would be cost effective since we’d have to hire 2 new staff, and we’d seriously damage our brand by screwing up communications.

The next day I connected Appointlet.

Now, only one person is needed to personally handle the small fraction of emails that need to be responded to. We spend less than 1% of our time scheduling, rescheduling, and sending reminders. We’ve blocked out specific times and days for specific appointments in different geographic areas and opened up phone appointments to minimize travel time.

We love the system and it impresses clients enhancing our brand. Appointlet appears to have saved us the equivalent of hiring 2 full time staff to handle the volume. It’s too early to tell the financial ROI of the entire project but we estimate that it will be in the magnitude of hundreds of thousands more net income because of the effectiveness and efficiency of the Appointlet system.

ROI

My estimate is that we will close 20 of the 207 appointments at an average of $1,000 per year or $20,000. I’d estimate that 50% of them we would have lost through slow response, mishandling info, appointment no-shows, or cancellations – IF we weren’t using Appointlet. The net increase in revenue for using Appointlet is around $10,000 + say, another $2,000 of staff time saved throughout the month. So we pay $45 per month and will earn/save about $12,000 more thanks to this simple scheduling tool.

What’s Next?

Right now our appointments are scheduled with 45 minute breaks in between. Our next test is to schedule them only 15 minutes apart by restricting them further to specific locations in an attempt to increase our ability to go from 5 per day average to 7 – 10 per day average. And, again, we will be encouraging people to sign up for evening and weekend telephone/webinar appointments in order to test how effectively we can sell over the phone.

P.S. Appointlet is much better in it’s overall functionality, flexibility, appearance to clients, and ease of use for our staff than the other online scheduling software we tried.

Samuel Ingersoll-Weng

Samuel Ingersoll-Weng is a consumer advocate who works with values based businesses and nonprofit organizations on business planning and marketing projects. He is a partner in a financial planning firm and other interesting business ventures.

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