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Praktisk guide

Cal.com

Give the customer a link to your available times instead of four emails back and forth about Tuesday or Thursday.

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What Cal.com is

You send an email and suggest Tuesday. The customer replies that Tuesday does not work but Thursday is fine. You reply that Thursday is booked. Four emails later you still have not booked anything.

Cal.com removes that whole back and forth. You connect your calendar, decide what times of day you can take meetings and how long they can be, and get a link. Anyone who wants to meet you opens the link, sees only the times you are actually free, and clicks. The booking lands in your calendar right away and the time is closed to others.

For a company the link is useful in more places than you first think: in your email signature, in your Instagram bio, on your business card for the trade fair, and in the mailing to the companies you want as partners.

Using Cal.com on Windows and Linux Mint

Cal.com is a web service, so there is no program to install. It makes no difference which operating system you are on; all you need is a browser.

  1. Go to cal.com and create an account.
  2. Choose your username with care. It ends up in the link, that is cal.com/dittnamn, and it should be possible to read out over the phone without spelling it.
  3. Connect the calendar you already use, usually Google or Outlook. Approve the permission the browser asks for.
  4. If you want it as its own icon in the taskbar or in the menu: open the page in Chrome or Edge, click the menu with three dots and choose to install the page as an app. It works the same way on Windows and on Mint.

Three things to do first

  1. Set your availability before you share the link. Under Availability you enter days and times. Set the end to 5 pm at the latest if you do not want bookings in the middle of dinner.
  2. Create two meeting types, not seven. One short one of 15 minutes for quick questions, one of 45 for real conversations. More choices only make people hesitate, and a visitor faced with seven meeting types with similar names closes the tab instead of guessing, which is exactly the problem you wanted to solve when you got a booking link in the first place.
  3. Add a buffer. In the settings for the meeting type there are fields for time before and after. Ten minutes after each meeting means you have time to write down what was said before the next person calls.

The most common trap

The big mistake is sharing the link before the calendar is connected. Cal.com knows nothing about your customer meeting on Tuesday morning, a supplier call on Wednesday or training on Thursday evening if it cannot read the calendar where that is stated. Without a connection, the service happily offers every time you have marked as available, and you are left with a booking in the middle of another meeting.

Connect the calendar first. Then open your own booking link in a private window and check how it looks to an outsider. It takes a minute and immediately reveals if something is wrong.

One more thing, for anyone who has read that Cal.com can be run on your own server. The open version is now called Cal.diy, and the project itself states that it is intended for personal use and is not recommended in production, and that it requires experience with server operations and databases. That is not a task to take on alongside everything else. Use the regular web service and spend the time on customers instead.

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