If you do not know someone — if you haven’t established a working relationship with them — you should never send them a Calendly link.
For those of you who don’t know what Calendly is, let’s break down how it works. It’s basically a link to someone’s schedule, and they’ll have a list of open slots where you can reserve a half-hour or so of their time for a meeting.
I get these emails all the time. “I’d love to partner with your company, here’s my Calendly link.”
You know what that looks like in real life?
That’s like going to an industry conference, walking up to random people, handing them a card, and saying “here’s my receptionist’s business card…schedule a call with me.”
If you did this in real life, everyone would laugh in your face, throw away the card, and have a story to tell over drinks, with the people at the conference they actually made a connection with.
It’s one thing if you’ve already got a business relationship with someone. At that point, Calendly is just a handy tool to prevent the back-and-forth of finding a good time to meet.
The purpose of Calendly is efficiency. That’s fine. But when it’s used by strangers, it’s an absolute disaster. Why?
What are you doing taking meetings without even a few back-and-forth emails? If a meeting with a new contact is not worth some back-and-forth communication, should you even be having this meeting?
What are you doing with so little free time that you have to use software to schedule your meetings? If your day is so rigidly scheduled, you’re either important enough to have a real person managing your day, or you’ve entirely lost track of priorities and productivity in favor of quantity rather than quality.
What are you doing that you can’t just call? Some things aren’t important enough to schedule a 30 minute meeting. Why not just call someone, and if they pick up you can chat for a couple minutes?
What are you doing that is so important you feel the need of reserving 30 minutes from a stranger’s day? Is this a life or death situation, or a seven figure acquisition deal, or are you just trying to sell a subscription?
There’s nothing wrong with sales. But impersonal sales? It’s essentially an oxymoron.
It’s time to cut out the automation, the distance, and the impersonality, and start making real connections.