Dropping poor meeting invites will end your freelancing days fast. Sending exceptional meeting invites can land a lifelong client.
If you are sending 4, or even 20, messages to schedule a meeting you are stressing your clients. Meeting invites shouldn’t take more than two communications via emails. Your job as a freelance professional is to reduce stress for your client partners and get the results.
Meeting invites are a little thing you need to get right. Get your meeting invites right and you will bring a smile to someone’s face on even the worst of days.
Here are some pointers for crafting exceptional meetings invites as a web professional:
- The value of a meeting is for relationship building, catching tone, and reducing confusion. If you are not meeting for one of these reasons, don’t have a meeting.
- Offer at least 3 meeting times and dates. Don’t make all the time slots the same. Morning, noon, and evening give your client a solid range.
- On a personal level. Unless you really do have a tight schedule every day, don’t schedule meetings using a meeting app/service. A meeting is a personal request and is an opportunity for relationship building.
- Don’t offer a Monday meeting unless you know your client wants a Monday. Monday is already busy enough.
- Be brief and be clear about the problem the meeting is going to solve. If you could summarize the meeting in the email you probably don’t need a meeting.
- Use ownership words like “our” and “we”.
- Send a calendar invite and don’t be late. Be clear about who is doing the scheduling in the message.
- Take detailed notes and send a recap response. Having a record of the discussion in context keeps the scope from creeping and sets expectations. No one wants to have multiple meetings.
- Personality. Have some because it shows confidence.
Here is a quick example of that I’m describing.
Hi Steve,
I hope you are doing well. As you said, the current marketing platform is not getting results and it’s critical we get our conversions up. I have three new marketing platform options we should discuss to be 100% certain we get more leads. A 23-minute call should do the trick.
Here are some sharp times and dates:
– Monday 25th, 10:00 am EST
– Monday 25th, 1:30 pm EST
– Thursday 28th, 3:30 pm EST
Let me know what works and I’ll book the meeting for us.
Thanks,
Kevin
P.S. I know you said Mondays are your meeting days so I’ve made two options for that day and included an alt just in case.
No one wants to waste time in a meeting. No one wants to waste time scheduling a meeting.
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