Booking links and workshops

Your public booking link lets a prospect pick a time and book a meeting with you in a few clicks, and that meeting flows straight back into Handshake as a tracked result.

What it is

Every person on your team can have a public booking page - a simple link you can share or drop into a message so a prospect can schedule a meeting with you. The prospect picks a day, picks a time, fills in a short form, and they are booked. The meeting then shows up in Handshake as a real result tied to that prospect, with no separate scheduling tool to wire up.

This page covers the booking link itself: What a prospect sees, how your availability controls the times on offer, and how a booking becomes a tracked meeting. The CRM side of meetings - the Bookings and Meetings dashboards, attendance, conversions and disputes - lives in Contacts, CRM and meetings. This page also briefly covers the public workshop page at the end.

Why it exists

Outbound only pays off when interested prospects actually get time on the calendar. Without a booking link you end up trading "when are you free?" emails, or pasting in a third-party scheduler that lives outside the tool and never reports back. Handshake's built-in booking link removes that friction: One link, your real availability, and the booked meeting is automatically logged against the right prospect so it counts towards your results.

Who can see it

  • The booking page itself is public. Anyone with the link can open it and book - they do not log in to Handshake.
  • Seat users manage their own booking page and availability under their Calendar, and see their own meetings under Bookings.
  • Client users can see and manage the booking pages for everyone on their team from the client-level Calendar, and see all team meetings rolled up under Meetings.
  • Partners and admins can do this for the clients and accounts in their scope.

How it works

What a prospect sees on the booking page

When a prospect opens your link (it looks like app.handshake.live/book/your-name), they see a clean three-step page:

  1. Pick a day. A month calendar shows which days you take meetings. Past days, days you are not available, and days that are already full are greyed out.
  2. Pick a time. Once they choose a day, the available time slots appear. The slots respect your meeting length, your buffers between meetings, the minimum notice you require, and any meetings you already have. Times are shown in the prospect's own timezone, detected automatically from their browser.
  3. Fill in the short form. They enter their Name and Email (both required), and optionally Phone, Company, and Notes. A summary shows the date and time they picked. They press Confirm Booking.

After confirming they see a Confirmed screen with the date, time, and who the meeting is with, and the line "A calendar invitation has been sent to" their email. If a video link is set on the meeting, a Join Meeting button appears. The page reminds them to check their email for reschedule or cancellation options. A prospect can cancel later from that email without needing a Handshake login.

Setting up your booking page (Calendar)

You configure your booking page under Calendar. The main controls are:

  • Booking link - your public URL. You can switch the page Active or Inactive, copy the link, open a preview, and set a custom URL (lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens). While the page is inactive, nobody can book.
  • Availability - your weekly working hours. For each day Monday to Sunday you add one or more time windows (for example 9:00-12:00 and 13:00-17:00). These windows are what generate the bookable slots. Days with no window are not bookable.
  • Booking settings:
    • Meeting duration - 15, 30, 45, 60, 90 or 120 minutes.
    • Buffer before and buffer after - protected gaps around each meeting (0 up to 60 minutes) so meetings do not land back-to-back.
    • Minimum notice - how many hours ahead a prospect must book (so nobody grabs a slot in the next five minutes).
    • Book up to - how many days into the future the calendar opens.
    • Max bookings per day - an optional daily cap; leave it blank for unlimited.
    • Timezone - the timezone your availability windows are defined in.

Save buttons only appear once you have changed something.

A client-level Calendar view lists everyone on the team with their booking status - Booking Active, Booking Inactive, or No Booking Page - and a Manage button to open and edit each person's settings, so a client can set these up on a team member's behalf.

You can hand the link out yourself, but Handshake can also generate personalised booking links for the contacts in a campaign. These carry a hidden token that ties the booking back to that exact contact, so even if the prospect books with a different email address, Handshake still knows who they are. Without a token, Handshake matches the booking to a contact by the email address they enter.

How a booking becomes a tracked meeting

When a prospect books:

  1. Handshake links the booking to a contact - first by the personalised link's token if there is one, otherwise by matching the email they entered against your contacts. If neither matches, the booking still saves; it is just not yet tied to a contact.
  2. The booking appears in your Bookings dashboard (and the client-wide Meetings view), and a confirmation email goes to the prospect.
  3. The meeting is logged as a result for that contact. After the meeting, when someone marks the prospect as having attended, the contact is recorded as converted. A no-show or a cancellation is tracked too. If a prospect cancels, Handshake can prompt them to rebook and flag it for the meeting owner.

Reminder emails are sent automatically for upcoming confirmed meetings (around 24 hours and 1 hour before), subject to each account's reminder preferences. The full lifecycle - marking attendance, conversions, the 7-day dispute window, and the stats - is covered in Contacts, CRM and meetings.

Connecting a real calendar (coming soon)

There is a place to connect a Google, Outlook or iCloud calendar so that times you are already busy are automatically blocked. This connection is not switched on yet - the connect buttons show as coming soon. For now your availability comes entirely from the weekly windows and existing Handshake bookings, not from a live external calendar.

Limits and what to watch out for

  • An inactive page takes no bookings. If prospects say your link is not working, check the page is set to Active and that the day you expect has an availability window.
  • No availability window means no slots. If a day shows nothing bookable, you have not added working hours for that day, or the day is already at its max bookings cap.
  • Minimum notice and "book up to" bound the calendar. Prospects cannot book sooner than your minimum notice or further out than your "book up to" window.
  • External calendar busy times are not yet respected. Until the calendar connection is switched on, Handshake does not know about meetings booked outside Handshake, so you can be double-booked against your own external calendar. Keep your availability windows realistic.
  • Email match is best-effort. A booking made with an email Handshake does not recognise (and without a personalised link) will not be tied to a contact automatically.
  • Meetings are captured only from booking pages. A meeting arranged purely over email or on the prospect's own invite will not show up unless it was booked through your Handshake link.
  • Prospects cancel from their email, not from inside Handshake, so make sure the confirmation email reaches them.

The workshop page

Handshake also serves a public workshop page (for example handshake.gro.bot/workshop, or a partner's own version). It is an interactive, chat-style session that helps a visitor clarify their positioning and messaging, and it acts as a lead magnet at the top of the funnel.

This is a marketing landing page, not a feature you set up or run from the portal. There is nothing to configure in your partner, client or account settings - the conversation and its flow are managed centrally. So there is no day-to-day workflow here for you to learn; it is simply a public asset that can feed interest into the platform.