Calendly Routing: Turn high-value leads into qualified meetings instantly

We’re all familiar with the status quo:

A prospect visits your site, compares your solution to others, and reads customer reviews. It’s a high-intent moment. They fill out a contact form … then they wait. Maybe they get a “we’ll be in touch” message, but no clear next steps or time frame.

Meanwhile, your team scrambles to figure out who the prospect should talk to on your team. Then it takes an average of seven emails to schedule the first meeting. 

All those delays give prospective buyers an opening to find a different solution.

Responding to a prospect within 5 minutes is the current best practice, believe it or not! That’s impossible when you’re still using manual or disconnected processes to qualify, route, and schedule leads.

Now with Calendly Routing, you can close deals faster than the competition by scheduling high-value leads on the spot. Best of all, it integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, and other tools your team already uses to automate inbound sales leads.

What Calendly Routing looks like in action

Let’s say your pipeline goal is to land sales meetings with people like Nora, an IT buyer at an enterprise software company. Nora fills out your contact form (which is already built in HubSpot and enriched with Clearbit).

You can send Nora straight to the booking page for your No. 1 enterprise sales rep. Nora is happy about that, and immediately books the meeting time that works best for her, with the exact person she needs to talk to.

What if the prospect is someone like Eric — not a 100% match, but still shows potential? You can route Eric to a team scheduling page that automates meeting distribution, so he can book a meeting with your first available sales rep.

So what happens if the person submitting the contact form isn’t a prospect at all, but an important customer like Jaden? It would be a mistake to send him to sales. Thankfully, Calendly connects to Salesforce, where Jaden’s account record is found, and he’s presented with the personal booking page for his assigned account manager. 

Each scenario is fast, easy, and accurate. It’s a flawless customer experience for every person who fills out the form.

The Smith.ai sales team was intrigued by the potential to convert inbound leads into qualified demos with the right account executive. The company's seeing great results so far, said Bryce Kropf, Senior Sales Manager at Smith.ai.

Since implementing Calendly Routing, Smith.ai has seen 34% of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) converting to appointments from their website. They've also seen a 20% increase in show rates for initial consults, since they've eliminated the confusion and messiness that comes from shifting reps, dates, and times.

Book qualified website leads on the spot

It’s easier than you think to add scheduling routes into your marketing landing page forms. In fact, your existing forms stay the same and you simply build the scheduling routes in Calendly. When you're done, add a snippet of code to your website and you're ready to go.

We like to think about it in three parts:

• Qualify: You can continue to qualify leads using your existing marketing forms in HubSpot, Marketo, or Pardot, or you can build new forms in Calendly. You can also continue to use hidden fields and marketing intelligence tools like Clearbit and ZoomInfo to populate company name, size, and other demographic data that may be available

• Route: Send known leads or existing customers directly to their assigned account owner’s booking page. (This happens automatically behind the scenes using a Salesforce lookup, filtering by deal stage, territory, or other fields in Salesforce — no manual reassignment needed!)

• Schedule: Present qualified prospects with a specific booking page so they can schedule a meeting immediately. For leads who don’t book, your existing routing rules and engines kick in as usual (via Salesforce, LeanData, Distribution Engine, etc.).

Calendly offers intuitive and flexible options to get you up and running quickly. Let’s dig a little deeper into each of the above components.

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1. Qualify leads in real time

Calendly Routing works with your marketing lead capture forms (which collect information like type of company, department, and job role). Then, when a lead or customer meets your criteria, they can book a meeting right after completing your form. 

Get started quickly using one of three options: 

• Import existing HubSpot forms

• Import existing Marketo forms

• Import existing Pardot forms

• Use Calendly’s Routing Forms 

If you have existing forms, they don't change. Just import them into Calendly to start building scheduling routes. If you don't use HubSpot, Marketo, or Pardot? No problem, you can simply build routing forms in Calendly.

You can embed Calendly routing forms on your website and landing pages and share them as links in emails. Both methods eliminate the back and forth of coordinating availability, and provide a consistent customer experience. 

If your HubSpot, Marketo, or Pardot forms use visible and hidden form field responses to qualify leads and surface specific booking pages, you can also use that data to determine which booking pages appear. That means you can continue to take advantage of data enrichment tools, like Clearbit or Zoominfo, that allow you to shorten your forms.

2. Automatically route known leads and existing customers

When you route and assign leads from your website automatically, you gain valuable opportunities and greater deal momentum. Real-time routing to booking pages lets you capture customers at the height of their interest (and thereby increase conversions)!

When connecting marketing forms to Calendly, you have two options: Automatically route by Salesforce assignment or Calendly’s native routing logic.

Calendly Routing is built for your Salesforce CRM. The Salesforce lookup lets you match known leads and customers to their assigned account owner and filter by deal stage, territory, or other fields in Salesforce. You can use any custom or standard Salesforce object (accounts, opportunities, and leads) and build conditions from any field that exists in that object. This way, leads and customers schedule directly with the right team member no matter the deal status or situation — without any manual reassignment.

For example, when "rachel@wotoly.com” fills out a form on your website, Calendly Routing looks up her Wotoly domain in Salesforce, sees the Wotoly opportunity already exists in Salesforce and the deal status is open, and automatically shows Rachel the booking page for Wotoly’s assigned sales rep.

When scheduling meetings with new prospects using Calendly, Salesforce automatically creates a new lead, contact, or opportunity. When the prospect already exists, the event is simply added to the existing record.

Reps will love using the integration to get back more selling time, and management will love that Salesforce data is always accurate without having to chase down their reps for updates or manually reassign leads.

At RCReports, the new routing feature has been a game changer, said Abbie Deaver, Director of Marketing. She said before, account executives (AEs) were each spending 5+ hours a month re-assigning demos that were booked on the wrong calendar, creating a disjointed experience for the customer, and frustration within the team.

3. Schedule high-value, qualified leads directly from your website

One surefire way to close your inbound gaps: Make sure when a website visitor hits “submit,” account lookup and qualification rules match them to the right booking page. 

But, you ask, “how do I ensure high-value leads can schedule on the spot, while also preventing the sales team from wasting time on unqualified leads?”

Great question. We recommend setting up three different types of routes: booking, screening, and fallback. Then, based on how the person fills out the form, your routes will determine what happens next.

Use booking routes for people you want to meet. These can take many shapes. For example, if you’re using Salesforce to identify known leads, you can route them to the personal booking page for their lead owner or opportunity owner. 

For unknown leads, you can send Fortune 500 companies to your Enterprise sales team for a 30-minute intro call. Or send qualified leads who speak Portuguese to a booking page for your Portuguese-speaking sales reps. Or when a qualified lead shows interest in a specific product, you can route them to a 45-minute demo with your product expert. The options are almost limitless. 

For leads that don’t qualify for a meeting, use screening routes to filter them out, and build a fallback route for those who don’t match your existing screening or booking routes. With screening and fallback routes, instead of sending prospects to a booking page, you can show them a custom message with next steps, ask for more information, or redirect them to a specific URL.

In most cases, you’ll want to send leads to a team scheduling page, where you use a Round Robin to spread meetings around your sales team. Round Robin Event Types examine the availability of every team member, and then auto-assign the meeting based on customizable event logic like availability, equal distribution, and team priorities.

You may choose to have one Round Robin booking page for your enterprise sales team, and separate booking pages for your mid-market reps and your SDRs. 

HubSpot's VP of Platform Ecosystem, Scott Brinker, said he's excited Calendly has built an integration to help HubSpot customers accelerate sales engagement.

Improve speed to lead and level up your pipeline

Today’s buyers expect to educate themselves about your products (via your website, blog, and third-party reviews) and to get immediate answers when they’re ready to engage. Your enterprise sales motion is no exception — especially when it comes to your “contact sales” page. 

When you engage with a lead at their moment of interest, you’re creating a positive customer experience and minimizing the possibility of competitors reaching them first. Calendly makes it simple to exceed buyers’ expectations and win their business. It integrates with your existing marketing automation tools, and is designed specifically to work with your Salesforce CRM. 

Calendly Routing’s various components can be mixed and matched depending on your plan. 

Why invest in creating all those high-intent opportunities if you can’t act on them right away? Get started with Calendly Routing today to maximize every revenue opportunity, get to each meeting milestone faster, and win more deals.