HubSpot Ideas

Coupland

Meeting Links to include multiple external attendees

We currently use the Team/Group option for allowing our prospects to schedule sales demos with multiple internal employees. Often there is an external party (not an employee or HubSpot user) we would like to include in the meeting or our prospects want to include other attendees (typically co-workers or their own consultants) of their own. We don't need to see their availability but I would like a way to CC the invite to them. Ideally, I would like to add an optional  CC address on the meeting configuration and we could optionally receive additional CC addresses via the meeting registration form.

 

This would eliminate some administrative work on my part and improve our communication/coordination. Currently, we have to keep an eye on meeting invites and add these additional attendees manually.

 

If you think this would benefit you, please vote for this idea!

HubSpot Updates
Delivered
January 26, 2024 06:38 AM

Hi,

 

Thank you for all of your feedback. This is now live to all, so I am changing the status to delivered.

 

I see recent feedback from some of our beta testers with requests that we automatically create contacts in HubSpot when a prospect provides guest emails during booking. At this time, the meetings tool will only automatically create contacts for those that are the ones actually booking the meeting. Any additional guests that are added can be seen from the meeting engagement in the contact's timeline, in the booking email notification that a rep receives when someone books time with then, and in the calendar event on your external calendar if you want to manually create contacts for these email addresses that were provided to you. Please continue to share your feedback on this and I will continue to monitor this thread as the team considers any future enhancements that we might make to this flow in the future, including the potential to make creating contacts for additional guests easier.

 

Thank you!

 

Melissa

November 09, 2023 02:04 PM

@JHinckley you can follow the steps in this KB article to join betas in HubSpot! Once enrolled in the public beta for Add Guests to Meetings via Scheduling Pages, you can turn on this new feature by navigating to the Form tab on any of your scheduling pages and turning on Allow guests

In Beta
November 09, 2023 01:33 PM

Hi!

 

Thank you all for your feedback. This went into Public Beta today if you would like to check it out early! The ability to allow guests when booking a meeting through a scheduling page is available to be turned on for any of your meetings links. Let us know if you have any early feedback on this feature!

Being Reviewed
September 19, 2021 06:28 PM

Hi Community,

 

Thanks for sharing these comments and ideas. We'll be reviewing this idea in the coming weeks to get a better understanding for what the technical lift would be to include such a feature. Should there be a potential 'quick win' then we may be able to project a timeline and update this idea to 'In planning' but should there be some complications, or we do not have the capacity to pick this work up this year, then we will update to 'Not currently planned' and assess where it will fall on our priorities in 2022. 

 

Some additional thoughts:

- As it was mentioned, we will not be able to check availability of contacts that are not on your team, so these meetings could be booked over their existing availability

- This would most likely be a feature add to the 'Group' meeting type.

- We will be reviewing this feature as part of a broader theme of work that we are currently reviewing to improve the flexibility and use-cases for scheduling across HubSpot

 

I hope this context is helpful, thanks again for your ideas and feedback!

105 Replies
dhendricks
Member

Great Idea!

jstroburg
Member

I need this functionality as well. I have a director of sales, but as the owner of my company, I would like to know which appointments are being set, and also, if there is a last minute scheduling conflict, I can step in and handle the call. 

Traxion-CW
Contributor

I agree that we need this. I am looking to set up a mini-webinar so that people can join twice a day, but I want to restrict the amount of people so it is a small group setting.

 

Calendly does it so you can select the amount of people that you allow to join. So I could have a time slot where I allow 3 people to join. Considering moving over to that for this function, but wondering if it is in the works here.

ulissesdias
Member

Great idea. Would love to see this implemented.

maxlynam
Member

There are multiple threads about adding this functionality .... as is very standard for the calendar apps hubspot meetings is supposed to replace.

Can anyone from HubSpot address this request that has been ongoing across mutliple threads for some time (years) - as it is a fairly stock-standard expected functionality right from the get go.

Is it going to happen - or do we just continue paying for calendly or other apps in addition to hubspot, when really we shouldn't have to ???

jessedpeters
Member

We need this functionality!!! The workaround to this is insane and shouldn't be this difficult. 

 

https://www.smartbugmedia.com/blog/how-to-do-a-webinar-with-hubspot-and-zoom

NCO
Top Contributor

Would love to see an update from Hubspot's end on this feature.

@roisinkirby - any insight that you can share?

 

@maxlynam - you mention that there are other threads with this feature request - can you link them here so that we can upvote/potentially merge them to increase visibility on Hubspot's end? Thanks.

mallen
Member

Is there any update from Hubspot on this calendar / meetings functionality? Having the ability for customers to book a meeting with mutliple attendees from their end is a pretty basic funtion of most other calendar apps such as Calendly. 

susanna1
Member

We lead group demos, as well as training "classes" for new customers. We offer them once a day, every day and multiple leads/customers sign up to attend the meetings. We currently use calendly/zapier/zoom/custom properties and automations to hack this together, but would love for it to be streamlined! 

AmyHubAus
Member

Desperate for the ability for multiple people booking functionality within calendar link - we have been asking our Hubspot rep for the past 2 years and upvoted every time it's mentioned in one of these threads. We run tours and need to book multiple people in with one rep at the same time. Please any updates Product team?? During Covid there are so many more virtual events, meetings this would be so helpful for our business. We also hack calendly/zapier/zoom and it doesn't help our business growth. 

NCO
Top Contributor

@AmyHubAus couldn't agree more.

There are a lot of things to like about Hubspot's meeting tool (especially if you're using the platform for sales and marketing and tying everything together), but there are a handful of limitations that don't appear to be on their product teams priority list.

 

Adding multiple people to a booking without using a shared calendar link should be a given, as should the ability to add a location field to the meeting marker! The feature already exists in manual meetings being booked directly from a contact/company record - why can't the automated calendar invite that gets sent after a meeting is booked through Hubspot's tool allow for a location??

 

As with many of the non-core Hubspot tools, the Meetings link will provide great value to those looking to use it on a very basic level. For anything beyond the low hanging fruit, you'll often need to explore a third-party option - and pay for it.

jstroburg
Member

As much as I would like this idea to come to fruition. I was just thinking the other day about setting up a distribution list (for example sales@xxx) on outlook to come to me and my business partner for updates to the shared calendar. I haven't tested it yet. 

ksalazar
Member

When booking an appoitment through the meetings link, it would be beneficial if you could include multiple Contacts. For example, husband and wife so that the invite goes to both calendars. Another example specific to our industry would be realtor and client. 

 

Right now, it only goes to whoever is booking the meeting. It then requires extra work to be forwarded through outlook or another channel. 

orangepegs
Contributor | Platinum Partner

A client just today asked about this functionality. The person booking the meeting should have the ability to add people on THEIR team too... Right now, they have to book then add to their calendar once done, which works, I suppose, but it's a big missed opportunity for getting leads into Hubspot's CRM.

LucasM
Participant | Diamond Partner

There are tools out there like Calendy that allow the person scheduling the meeting the ability to add guests to the meeting they are scheduling. This is a feature that has existed for several years in other platforms and would be a great way to simplify the meeting scheduling process. The advantages that I see are: 

  1. As the meeting host, you will have some idea of who will be at the meeting, even if all you get is their email. 
  2. As the lead/customer requesting the meeting you will be able to create the invite all at once and not have to forward the invite. 
  3. As the company, you will be able to build a better view of the buying process and have emails to create additional contacts to allow the user to nurture additional leads. 

With how the meetings booking tool stands now it does not allow the ability to invite guests and this pushes people to use tools outside of the HubSpot platform to do something that the platform should be able to do. The complicates reporting, user adoption, and the general view of the platform's capabilities when simple features like this are absent. 

NCO
Top Contributor

@LucasM 

The Hubspot meeting tool has a number of great features but misses the mark badly on too many others.

On top on the inability to invite guests:

 

1 - You can't insert a "location"

2 - If you want to include colleagues on the invite, they must be added as contacts within your CRM (ie. you can't add Hubspot users as attendees)

3 - You can't personalize any of the text in the automated confirmation email/reminder email once someone books a meeting.

 

#3 is particularly frustrating because it just pulls the meeting description into a generic email text ("You are confirmed to speak about the following: Description"), often a very choppy flow of information.

 

The question then becomes is it better to use a free (with subscription) native tool that gets the job done 50% or pay for an external platform to get the job done 100% correctly.

jimiromanus2
Participant

100% Needed.

We want to use Hubspot Meetings for trainings and would love for the open attendee option to be included.

HaroldC
Member

Just like @NCO and others have said.

Including multiple attendees to a meeting is such a basic feature that is surprising to see that HubSpot does not have it in its standard functionality. 

KevinJohnson
Participant

Hi,

 

Let me be clear, I would love to have this feature.  It is a feature that is available in EVERY other product, so it seems bad that not only is it not here, the Hubpost team hasn't bothered to respond to these posts in almost 2 years.  (I am a bit irritated since I was asking support for this feature and their answer was "follow this post to see progress")

Kevin

JGillam
Member

This is a major failure on the part of HubSpot not to have implemented this yet. This is a broken sales feature. When I have a meeting, my attendee has no choice but to forward the invite (since there is no way to add people), and then I don't get any of the contacts for other attendees because HubSpot fails to capture them.  

 

This actually works perfectly in other calendar apps (Calendly or freebusy.io). This should be an easy win.