Dreamforce 2008 Partner Preview: TimeDriver : Best Practices in B2B Demand Generation

After my post about ActevaRSVP I was contacted by another Salesforce.com partner that is going to be at Dreamforce. Dave deBronkart, Marketing Analytics director for TimeTrade Systems called me for two reasons … he really likes to talk about marketing in general, but also thought I might be interested in their TimeDriver product and a promotion they have going on at Dreamforce. He left a message I didn’t get back to right away, but he also sent an email.

I was immediately fascinated by a single line nestled within his email signature…

To schedule time with me, click here: 15 min | 30 min | 60 min

Huh.

I had gotten that voicemail from Dave, and I halfway/kinda/sorta listened to it that first time but not enough to remember exactly what he said his company did. Sorry Dave, not your fault – I was having one of those days! But then I saw the email signature and remembered that he had mentioned something about having a time scheduling application I might like. So I did what any curious marketer would do. I clicked on the link to book 15 minutes with Dave.

I was taken to a landing page with some simple, clear messaging and Dave’s picture, asking me if I wanted to check Dave’s availability for a meeting. Yes, I do! I was greeted with a simple-to-navigate calendar view, complete with Time Zone preferences showing me when Dave was available to talk.

I picked my time, entered some information on how Dave could contact me and what I hoped to talk about, and was able to save it to my Outlook calendar (or Google calendar) right from the confirmation page.

How cool is that!

The immediate, obvious use is as a great addition to the email signature line of a salesperson who is looking to book appointments - but who may be frustrated with the back and forth it usually takes to find a time that works for everybody. But as a B2B marketer, I was also struck by how amazing it would have been to incorporate this simple link into an email campaign I had just sent out to 7000 members of my house list, hoping to drive appointments to our inside sales team. The email had performed well, but how many more appointments might I have booked with a simple scheduler like this, that synchronized with the calendars of choice for my whole sales team?

When I spoke to Dave (who called me promptly at the appointed 9am at the number I provided) we talked a bit about that. He mentioned an A/B test he ran to his house list, half with the link and half without. They booked 56% more appointments from the emails with the link.

Granted, this is Dave running an email campaign against his house list and not Marketing Sherpa running the analysis - but let's do that math on that with a hypothetical situation. Let's say you sell a product that costs $10,000. If it takes 100,000 emails to generate 15,000 opens (15% open rate) to generate 375 clicks (2.5% click-through) to book 20 appointments (5% conversion) of which 4 end up as sales (if you're lucky!) that's $40,000 in revenue. If you could increase the number of appointments booked by 50% with the same message, your new revenue number would be $60,000. Not bad at all.

Do you want to hear the best part? It costs less than $30 per user. Per Year. With a 90 day free trial. Subscribers can open up their calendars completely, or they can set specific availabilities for TimeDriver-fed meetings.

Check out the TimeDriver Dreamforce offer here (start by clicking on the "Click to Schedule" Button), and stop by their booth to learn how it integrates with Salesforce.com.

Thanks, Dave!