Playbook, marketing agency
Can we get a call booked, typed by four different people
The request looks identical whoever sends it. One is a prospect worth a discovery call. One is a client who cannot reach their account lead and has given up on email. One is selling something. And one wants an hour of somebody's time for a dissertation or a portfolio review. Telling them apart costs one question and saves the calendar.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for appointment booking holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- A call requested with a brief or a deck attached is frequently a request for the agency to pitch, which is unpaid work, and the material has to draw the line between a conversation and a proposal before anybody agrees a date.
- An existing client asking for a call is not new business and must never be routed as though they were, because being sent to a sales inbox by your own agency is a small humiliation clients remember.
- The agency has a booking link and the assistant can neither see it working nor write to it, so the honest reply hands the link over rather than implying a slot is being held.
- A real share of the traffic is suppliers, freelancers looking for work and students, all politely typing the same sentence as the best prospect of the month, and each has a different destination.
How it arrives
- can we get twenty minutes with someone this week
- i sent a brief last week can we talk it through
- we are already a client and cannot reach our account lead
- do you charge for the first meeting
- i am a freelancer who do i send my portfolio to
- can you pitch for our business
What has to be indexed for this to work
| What each kind of conversation is for | A discovery call, a credentials meeting and a paid workshop are three different things with different attendees and different outputs. Name them, or every request arrives as the vaguest one. |
|---|---|
| Whether anything at this stage is chargeable | Where the free conversation ends and paid work begins, stated plainly. Agencies lose weeks to work done in the hope of an engagement, and a published line is the cheapest defence available. |
| Separate destinations for clients, suppliers and speculative approaches | Three addresses, or at minimum three sentences. The cost of getting this wrong is not a missed enquiry, it is a paying client discovering they have been put in the sales queue. |
| The booking route itself | The link, the form or the number, and what somebody should have ready before they use it. Pointing at that every time is the whole of what an assistant can do about a diary. |
The reply
Happy to point you the right way. A discovery call is the first conversation about new work, and the booking link with a description of what it covers is on our contact page [1]. If you already work with us there is a separate route to your account team on the same page, and that is the one to use so it does not sit in the new business queue [2]. I cannot see a calendar or hold a time, so booking happens on that link. If you would rather somebody came back to you, leave your name, an email and a line on what it is about.
It routes before it books, because the wrong queue is the expensive mistake here rather than a slow reply. Naming the client route explicitly, and giving the reason, reassures somebody who is already irritated. And it is clear the diary is out of reach before it offers an alternative, so nobody sits waiting for a confirmation.
Where it stops
The trigger. The visitor asks the agency to review a brief, respond to a tender or attend a pitch, or an existing client raises something about their account.
Whether we take that on is a conversation rather than a booking, and I cannot commit anybody's time. Leave your name, an email and a line on what you are looking for and new business will come back to you.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never confirm a time, a date or a person's availability, because nothing here can see a calendar.
- Never agree that the agency will pitch, respond to a tender, or prepare anything ahead of a call.
- Never tell a prospect the first conversation is free unless your published position says so.
- Never send an existing client's question into the new business route.
Questions
- Could it book the call if we connected our calendar?
- No. It reads what you publish and writes nowhere, so the most it does is put the right link in front of the right person with an accurate description of the call. That still converts, because what stops prospects booking is uncertainty rather than friction.
- How does it tell a client from a prospect?
- From the question, most of the time, which is why the material needs a clearly separate client route with its own vocabulary. Check the citations occasionally to see which page it reached for.
- People ask us to pitch. What should it say?
- Nothing that sounds like agreement. Publish where a conversation ends and paid work starts, and let the assistant quote that. An assistant which cheerfully accepts a tender invitation has committed a week of somebody's time.
Keep reading
- Everything for a marketing agencyService definitions and engagement terms convert. A price quoted for work nobody has scoped is the trap on an agency site.
- Handling appointment booking in generalIt cannot write into a calendar. The job is removing every reason not to book, then handing over with the details already gathered.
- Our own site, and the sites we build for other peopleOne visitor cannot use the agency's own site. Another is buying accessible work. The honest page answers them in different paragraphs.
- What our hours mean when something is running all nightThe office closes at six. The spend does not. What to publish about cover, reporting days, and who is watching a live account overnight.
- Which payment failed, and how fast does it matterA retainer invoice that bounces is a finance matter. A card declining on an advertising account stops live delivery within hours.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.