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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Don’t offer a Monday meeting unless you know your client wants a Monday. Monday is already busy enough.
  5. 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.
  6. Use ownership words like “our” and “we”.
  7. Send a calendar invite and don’t be late. Be clear about who is doing the scheduling in the message.
  8. 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.
  9. 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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