239. Tech Tools: How Smarter Scheduling Leads to Stronger Communication

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: This Tech Tools miniseries is brought to you by Prezi, the presentation tool that makes your ideas easy to follow, hard to forget, and faster than ever to create with Prezi AI. The best investment is in the tools of one's own trade. At Think Fast Talk Smart, we are taking this quote by Benjamin Franklin, the famous US inventor and founding father, very seriously. As you know, our show strives to share tips and techniques to help you hone and improve your communication and careers. These practices and approaches can be augmented with tools and technology. I'm Matt Abrahams. I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to this Tech Tools miniseries of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. In this multi-part miniseries, we'll introduce you to tools we use at Think Fast Talk Smart to help us be better at our spoken and written communication. And you'll learn best practices from the founders who created them. Taken together, we hope these communication tools will help you find new ways to think fast and talk smart. Hi Darren. Welcome. I'm really excited to have you on the show.

[00:01:09] Darren Chait: Likewise. Thanks, Matt. Really excited to be here.

[00:01:12] Matt Abrahams: So many of us have likely scheduled a meeting through Calendly. Some of our listeners might not know exactly what Calendly is. Can you share what your product is using the pitch structure I teach my MBA students, which is what if you could, so that, for example, and that's not all.

[00:01:31] Darren Chait: What if you could avoid the back and forth of scheduling, the sharing availability, navigating time zones, or even working out who the right person is to meet for your business, so that you can schedule faster get the right person in front of the right team, and ultimately turn those meetings into revenue, candidates in the right roles, and a much more efficient way to engage with your customers, clients, stakeholders, partners, candidates, whoever it is that you meet to get business done. For example, you can imbed Calendly on your website, people can come to you, they can find a time that works for them, they can even pay you depending on the service that you use. Or they may be routed to the right person if they're looking for a demo, get them to the right territory manager or the right person to meet with them.

[00:02:16] Or you can look across multiple schedules to find the group people that they need to meet with, in many cases. But that's not all, what if you could have one platform that not just allowed the ease of scheduling like you're used to with Calendly today, but it also helps you prepare, engage, and follow up on meetings. So we've got some advanced AI solutions coming that allow you to address preparation, engagement, and follow-ups as well. We all know meeting life cycles, not just about how meetings are scheduled, but how to make the meetings successful before, during, and after. So lots to share there soon as well. 

[00:02:47] Matt Abrahams: That's really exciting, just taking out the struggle of scheduling a meeting, but to then add onto it, increasing the likelihood of success sounds great. Thank you. So I'm curious to get the origin story of Calendly. What led to the creation of the tool? 

[00:03:02] Darren Chait: Yeah, so our founder and CEO, Tope Awotona, who is our CEO today, still in 2013, he was working in a sales role. And like many of us who are selling either with a title that looks like a salesperson or just in our everyday professional lives, we all do a lot of selling, he was spending such a large part of his day going backwards and forwards, trying to find the right time, trying to get the right people on the calendar by navigating schedules. And we all know when you're booking a meeting with a prospect, a candidate, a partner, an advisor, whoever it is, you don't wanna lose that momentum.

[00:03:33] I don't want to have seven point six emails, which we know on average it takes to get a meeting scheduled. If they're interested in meeting me, I want to meet them as quick and as easy and as painlessly as I can. So that frustrated Tope, it was hurting his pipelines as working in software sales. So he founded Calendly to build a solution, to build that scheduling link that would now become a household name.

[00:03:53] So that was 2013. And naturally you add in all the layers from there. It's really great for you and I to be able to schedule seamlessly, but I actually need a more technical resource to join this demo, or I wanna share the load around amongst the four or five of us that work in a team. Or I want you to be able to book your home services appointment via my website and then actually wanna charge you right then and there because that's how I make money as a small business owner.

[00:04:17] All of these features and use cases allowed us to become the scheduling automation platform that we are today. The next piece of the puzzle is very much the meeting itself. It's an honor to be a part of so many hundreds of millions of meetings a year, but being apart in terms of scheduling is a small piece of the puzzle. And we know that our customers are looking to us for more of the lifecycle. How do we prepare and engage and follow up on the meetings as well? And that's where we're heading as a business. 

[00:04:44] Matt Abrahams: Thanks for that. And it's certainly a ripe field, right? There's a lot that can be done. I know your firm has conducted research into meetings. What are some of the most interesting and useful results that you've found from that research?

[00:04:58] Darren Chait: We've been talking about meetings for more than ten years, and it's an area that anyone who, you know, has an interest in productivity in the workplace and the way we work together thinks about a lot naturally. We've actually just released our state of meetings report for 2024, and it's a really good read. I can, I can pass on a link if you're interested, but what I found fascinating was the change in perspective over time. So we all talk pretty poorly about meetings and there's lots of meetings out there about meetings that should have been emails.

[00:05:24] And we all, we don't purport to want less meetings and meetings that didn't need to be meetings and all that sort of sentiment. But the reality is that meetings are where we make money. Meetings are where we align teams, meetings are where we get work done. In many roles, especially customer or externally facing roles, without meetings, you don't make money, you don't get any work done. But the reality is obviously many meetings are not effective. Many meetings suck. They don't achieve those outcomes. And for the first time in all the years I've been thinking about this, that was really clear in the data.

[00:05:57] Where respondents, professionals, the thousands of people we spoke to, really said quite expressly that more meetings would be helpful. They want more meetings. Eighty-one percent of respondents in this particular study said that more productive meetings or more meetings that were productive, would help with the work, and fifty-four percent said more meetings would enhance their productivity at work. So on one sense, on one side, we are out there talking about meetings that should have been emails, these unproductive days that I spend in meetings. But then the overwhelming majority of professionals saying, gimme more. I need more meetings. And that's a really interesting dichotomy to reconcile. 

[00:06:33] Matt Abrahams: I can certainly appreciate the need for effective meetings, and that's really where it becomes the challenge. And effective could be who's in the room, what we're trying to accomplish. So I'm glad that there's data that are helping us hone in and figure out what is desired out of meetings. Because many of our meetings aren't as effective as they could have been and helping people understand what makes for an effective meeting, I think is really helpful.

[00:06:59] Darren Chait: I used to say meetings, debate, decision making and discussion, and we saw that, right? forty-one percent of respondents said the external meetings, they're much more productive when they're used for direction and goal setting. A similar proportion said when they're used for decision making. That's exactly it. It's what's the purpose of the meeting? Why do I need the meeting? If it's for the right reasons we all crave it. We want more of them. If it's not for the right reasons, if we're just sharing information, if we're going in circles without a clear goal or objective, we don't wanna see it. That competes with productive work. 

[00:07:30] Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. So make meetings useful instead of competition for getting work done. Thank you for that. So Darren, before we end, I'm asking all of the guests of this miniseries two questions. Are you ready for this?

[00:07:43] Darren Chait: Let's do it.

[00:07:44] Matt Abrahams: Alright. I'd be very curious, who is a communicator you admire and why? 

[00:07:49] Darren Chait: The storyteller archetype, in my view, are the best communicators out there. And I was just thinking then about who I would describe. I'll tell you a storyteller who I really admire. Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, go and look up the, when they announced trips, one of their new features, the way he tells this story for a prolonged period of time, had me on the edge of my seat. And I think it's such a great example of the importance of storytelling in everything you do professionally and personally. So big fan of his as a communicator for that reason. 

[00:08:19] Matt Abrahams: I think storytelling is a critical skill for getting lots of information across and talk about a tool for engagement, storytelling actually works. Something that many people don't think about, germane to what we're talking about, is you can bring story into meetings, and in fact, it can help make meetings more memorable. So thank you for highlighting that. Final question. Beyond your tool, beyond Calendly, what is one communication hack, tool, or shortcut that you use to help yourself be more effective in your communication? 

[00:08:48] Darren Chait: So this might sound strange being in the business of meetings, but asynchronous communication or asynchronous collaboration is how I'm successful. So what I mean by that is I spoke earlier about when you need a meeting and when you don't. When I don't need a meeting, I still need to collaborate with my peers. And we all know that often we feel the temptation to just schedule meetings when it's unnecessary. So I know you've spoken to the folks at Loom who I'm a big fan of, but as a principal in general, being able to share content in an asynchronous way, video, audio notes, high bandwidth ways of sharing too, right? Rather than just a message or an email, is really how my team is so effective, particularly across time zones, remote, different working styles, and so on. It's a very strong principle in the way I work and I collaborate by using video, audio, and the like to share messages asynchronously.

[00:09:38] Matt Abrahams: I really appreciate that because that is a super useful strategy for getting things done and it allows meetings to serve the function that meetings should, which is for creative collaboration, the ability to iterate and decide and challenge. It offloads a lot of the things that we use meetings for. One of the most important things I think, that I really wanna highlight that you said is these are for the interactions that allow for the meetings to be effective, and I really appreciate that. Darren, this has been a great conversation. You've given us lots of insights into how we not only can schedule and plan for our meetings, but some of the things that we should be thinking about and doing when we are actually meeting. I appreciate your time and I appreciate the advice.

[00:10:19] Darren Chait: Great to chat. Thanks very much for having me.

[00:10:24] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for one of our Communication Tools episodes of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. Please be sure to listen to all of the episodes in this miniseries. We appreciate Prezi's sponsorship of these episodes. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram, and check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks episodes, Ask Matt Anythings, and much more, at fastersmarter.io/premium.