Calendar sharing internally

Devon Lee

how are your company's teams sharing details about upcoming meetings?

Our Solutions Engineers and AEs handle much of our upsell/cross-sell growth and have asked for more visibility to upcoming meetings that they might join. In most cases, a conversation will already be started between the CSM and the other team, but this has come up a few times from other teams looking for quick feedback or to have an introduction into the client. Shared Gcal calendars is my initial thought,  but is there something else out there that could aggregate multiple calendars?

 - SFDC report, InsightSquared, basic calendar sharing, am I completely missing something obvious?

Russell Bourne

@Devon Lee, are you asking about upcoming internal meetings, or external customer-facing?

Generally I would advise that if you're a CSM and you want to bring a SE or AE into a customer call, you would want to have an internal sync first.  Get on the same page about account details, goals and strategies for the external call, any special circumstances, etc.  Ideally the CSM would follow that up with a written recap (internally) either on email or a shared o365/Drive file for everyone to refer back to during the customer call.

The calendar invite for the external call should provide an agenda that's as brief as possible for the benefit of the external invitees.

Devon Lee

yes, i definitely agree that internal sync with some clear objectives is the ideal before a customer call. My ask maybe is more of "how is your CS team providing visibility into their upcoming projects or client initiatives?"

gurd3v

Ideally all activity/events are synced into your CRM. 

If a CSM sends an email looking to schedule a call and there's back and forth about what that call is regarding, having that synced into CRM will give your SE/AE insight into what the convo is regarding. Similarly, there are scheduling tools that sync with CRM's so that you can see when the call is scheduled for what date within the activity. 

Hope this answers your question!

Warwick Brown

Hi Devon, sharing calendars is pull, not push - so unless people go looking, they're not going to know you've got a meeting.  There are much better ways to bring accountability, collaboration and automation together.

Here's an example of how I use Mindmeister for meetings. 

• Set up the agenda
• Share with client and relevant colleagues
• Create a simple task requesting feedback for the agenda with reminders

That's it.

Mindmeister takes care of the rest - it saves me a ton of emails and I can use Mindmeister in the meeting to capture notes and action items and also turn it into a presentation.

And if I need to have a pre-meeting with colleagues - then it's about a specific topic they've raised, not just to let them know there's a meeting coming up and do they have anything they want raised.  Beware of meetings about meetings.

You could follow a similar approach with other platforms like Smartsheet, Trello, Asana, Airtable and more, but I like Mindmeister for this particular objective as it's visual, engaging, simple and different - a nice way to stand out from a sea of boring.

Click here to copy my template below - let me know if you give it a try