Cengage uses Calendly to scale its sales and retention secret sauce

Cengage, a leading education and technology company, focuses on creating e-learning solutions for higher education faculty that build momentum towards bright futures for students.

Highlights

The team at Cengage knows the more qualified leads they're spending time with, the more they sell. They also know the most important predictor of long-term success and adoption is when new customers attend training sessions.

So, how do they make it easy for qualified leads to connect with them and encourage more customers to schedule trainings? That’s where Calendly fits in and helps them scale.

Empowering qualified leads to easily schedule and share important information

The Cengage customer experience starts with sales through email outreach. Using their marketing automation platform, Eloqua, the sales team embeds a Calendly link to schedule time to connect.

“We’re trying to get calls scheduled and make sure when we do have a call, there’s something to talk about. Including a Calendly link to gather the information we need makes sure calls are more specific and will be much more meaningful than a cold call. As a sales rep, it makes a world of difference.”

Once a deal closes, the sales team hands off new customers to the customer success team to schedule their onboarding and training call. So those who have adopted Cengage's digital content can start using the technology as proficiently as possible.

As most new customers are familiar with Calendly from the sales process, this makes for a very consistent experience and a quick way to schedule when customers are most interested.

Improving customer education and satisfaction, leading to increased retention rates

Calendly helps create a more seamless process — most importantly for prospects and customers, but also for the Cengage team.

There’s accountability and control on the customer’s side to schedule their training, and those who take the time to do so are often more successful.

This leads to higher retention rates for Cengage, so it’s very important to offer a quick and easy way to secure a time. It also helps the customer success team manage the large volume of calls for training, implementation and customization that can reach up to 10 calls a day per rep during busy season.

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