Pearl: Offer your availability first to reduce scheduling friction
Annie Pearl · Behind the scenes of Calendly’s rapid growth | Annie Pearl (CPO) · Feb 26, 2023 · at 4:39
Annie Pearl, Chief Product Officer at Calendly, explains how to share scheduling links without creating social friction or making the request feel like an awkward power move.
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“I think at a high level, I think I recommend first really just kind of opening the door for the person you're trying to schedule time with to share their availability first, right? So instead of just sending the link, I usually start the email with something like, you know, looking forward to connecting, feel free to share. Sometimes you're available or easier. You can choose, you know, find time on my calendar using the Calendly link here. So opening the door to let them choose before you offer up your Calendly link, I think is, you know, a little bit of a subtle way to let them take the lead if they want. The second piece I would recommend too, is once you kind of open that door, you can kind of further reduce the effort on the recipient by adding times you're available directly in the email. So when you go to share Calendly link, there's an option to add times to email and you can then just paste those directly into the email you're creating. So that reduces yet another sort of point of friction to ask the user to click the link and, you know, get taken to Calendly. So opening the door and then, you know, adding times to email are two things that I do to really Make sure that it's not awkward and it doesn't put the burden on the other person.”
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