How do I use Calendly for booking meetings at a tradeshow with multiple tables and multiple staff?

Hi ​@Lynn50775!

Great question and a scenario we’ve certainly seen a few times, but yours is a bit unique with the conference room aspect!

So there’s a few big moving pieces to the solution, but first things first is that I’d recommend getting all 10 staff members and the conference rooms setup as Teams accounts. This ensures you’ll be able to add them into relevant events and utilize the full capabilities of Calendly. You can learn more about setting up Teams here: https://help.calendly.com/hc/en-us/articles/23343597955863-Using-Calendly-with-a-team

After that, it sounds like conference rooms are basically the common denominator for these meetings so I’d recommend creating a Collective event for each of the conference rooms. So if you have 4 conference rooms, you’d have “Conference Room #1”, “Conference Room #2”, and so on. You can definitely get more creative with naming than that! On these events, you can either add all the staff members now (and then remove as needed) or add them at scheduling (more on that in a moment). Also, absolutely do leverage cloning events. It’ll make your life easier! More on Collective events here: https://help.calendly.com/hc/en-us/articles/14074913220247-How-to-create-a-Collective-team-event-type

As for the conference itself, the process that works best is leveraging Calendly Contacts. When you’ve got a customer you want to grab time with, the staff member would create a new Contact from the customer information (this also ensures you’ve got their details even if they don’t end up scheduling time). Once they’ve done that, they’ll open up the contact, click on ‘Book Meeting’, and select the Collective event for the relevant conference room. From there, they can add or remove staff members and add other customers as guests if needed. More on Contacts here: https://help.calendly.com/hc/en-us/articles/20058132533655-Contacts-overview and more on scheduling Contacts here: https://help.calendly.com/hc/en-us/articles/26738893198359-How-to-schedule-a-contact.

The one piece that can’t be solved with Calendly the way we’re approaching this is initially figuring out which conference room to use so you aren’t having to try all 4 events to find availability. I’d recommend having a shared calendar that is easy for staff members to quickly look at and say “Conference Room #2 is available at 1pm. I’ll grab that!” before heading into the respective event. Could also be worth having the same for staff members too so it’s easy to figure out which staff members are available to add.

I think that’s everything. Give it a try before the conference and let us know how if it works for you. We’re here to help and find some funky solutions if needed!