How marketing teams deliver more MQLs with Calendly

Marketing teams face many challenges, but demand generation is one of the biggest.

That’s not just one marketer’s opinion. According to Calendly’s Growth Week survey, 64% of sales and marketing pros saw a decrease in inbound leads in 2023. Plus, 69% of sales and marketing professionals say getting leads to actually schedule a meeting is the hardest part of inbound marketing and sales.

Marketing teams need to fill the pipeline with marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) ready to talk to sales. But when there’s too much friction in the process — like slow response times, or too much back and forth to schedule a meeting — even the most qualified leads can drop out of the funnel and never connect with your sales team. 

When you add Calendly to your demand gen strategy, you can stop leads from slipping through the cracks and get them on the path to closed deals faster.

In this article, we’ll walk through five ways your marketing team can use Calendly to automate your demand gen and lead qualification processes, offer a better prospect experience, and create a smoother handoff from marketing to sales.

5 ways to deliver more MQLs with Calendly

1. Embed scheduling on your website

Adding scheduling to your website can instantly turn visitors into booked meetings at the height of their interest. Prospects don’t have to wait to hear back from a sales rep, and the sales team can stop spending valuable time manually following up with inbound leads.

When you embed Calendly on your website, visitors can schedule a meeting in just a few clicks, without the back and forth.

Pro tip

Use sales enrichment tools to create a targeted experience for prospects. Platforms like Clearbit review IP addresses and present a customized site (including your scheduling page) to visitors from high-value target companies.

2. Qualify and book leads from your marketing forms

According to a report from Ruler Analytics, 84% of marketers use form submissions for lead generation. What if you could use your website forms for lead qualification, routing, and booking, too?

With Calendly Routing, you can show scheduling pages only to leads who meet your qualifications, like company size or industry. You can qualify leads through marketing forms in HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, or build new forms in Calendly.

Once they fill out the form, Calendly Routing automatically routes visitors to the right rep or team’s booking page based on their form responses, so they can schedule immediately. (For leads who don’t book, your existing routing rules and engines kick in as usual.)

By integrating Calendly with Salesforce or HubSpot, known leads or existing customers are instantly matched to their account owner’s booking page, so no one has to spend valuable time manually reassigning leads.

“We’re seeing an incredible 26% increase in demos booked through the form. The experience is clearly resonating with customers and it’s driving better end results for our sales and marketing teams.”

Bryce Kropf

Sales Enablement Manager at Smith.ai

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3. Automate lead distribution

Connect leads with sales reps even faster by automating lead distribution. When a prospect chooses a meeting time on your booking page, Calendly’s Round Robin functionality looks at team members’ availability and automatically assigns the meeting to a rep. You can match prospects with the next-available rep, or distribute inbound leads equally across your team.

Round Robin scheduling lets sales teams respond to meeting requests faster and save time manually assigning leads, so you can stay ahead of the competition.

“We feel confident that when a lead comes in, it goes reliably to different team members. Calendly’s Round Robin feature saves a lot of headaches, especially when assigning which appointment goes to whom.”

Donald Kelly

Founder at The Sales Evangelist

4. Make “schedule a demo” your campaign CTA

Your demand gen efforts aren’t limited to your website. Neither is Calendly! Adding Calendly booking links to your email marketing or ad campaigns is a great way to boost MQLs.

Instead of using “learn more” or “contact us” as your call-to-action (CTA), consider asking prospects to schedule a demo with a link to your booking page. Just like the website embed, prospects can book with your sales team at the height of their interest — without going back and forth to find a time or waiting for a response to their form fill.

Pro tip

Try using different scheduling pages (Calendly Event Types) for each campaign to help you track MQL sources and campaign goals more closely.

What’s great about the Calendly-as-CTA approach is that it works with any number of campaign types and stages. For example, offering meeting opportunities in your nurture, re-engagement, and even welcome emails helps you connect with prospects at any point in the buyer’s journey.

5. Connect the tools in your marketing tech stack

Automation and integrations go hand in hand when it comes to improving your demand gen and lead qualification processes. When all of your tools talk to each other, all of the data you need is in one place, making the handoff from marketing to sales smoother.

Calendly offers 100+ integrations with the tools teams use every day, including CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and sales software.

Here are just a few ways marketers use Calendly’s integrations to sync data and track campaign performance:

• Calendly + HubSpot: Keep HubSpot records up to date and add instant, account-matched scheduling to your HubSpot forms. Trigger retargeting campaigns based on whether or not a lead books a meeting.

• Calendly + Clearbit: Qualify leads faster with Clearbit enriched forms and Calendly Routing.

• Calendly + Meta Pixel: Track how customers interact with your Calendly booking pages, then use that data to build better ad campaigns.

• Calendly + Google Analytics: Track visits and engagement with each of your scheduling pages to measure campaign funnels and conversions.

“As one of the most used Apps in the HubSpot Marketplace, we love to see Calendly offering new features that streamline inbound sales and marketing in a fully integrated way.”

Scott Brinker

VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot

The best part? Integrating Calendly with your marketing tech stack can help you prove the value of your programs. Now you can get a clearer picture of which messages, campaigns, and routing forms resulted in booked meetings — and revenue.

Fill your pipeline and create a better handoff from marketing to sales

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges facing today’s sales and marketing teams — but with the right tactics and tools, you can give your team a competitive advantage.

“A good tool is one that’s so simple, sales reps can basically forget about it and let the meetings roll in. That’s essentially what happened when we implemented Calendly.”

Julia Pan

Sales Enablement Manager at SignPost

When you make scheduling automation part of your demand gen strategy, you make it easier and faster for your marketing team to send sales high-quality leads — and for those leads to get in touch with a sales rep ASAP. Hit your pipeline goals, create a better prospect experience, and convert more leads.

Ready to start delivering more MQLs? Get a Calendly demo.