The challenge

Manual scheduling across time zones was at odds with company growth

When Katalon started to experience exponential growth, they knew their old inbound sales process couldn’t scale. 

Daisy Hoang, Senior Vice President of Sales and Success at Katalon, shared that “just being able to serve potential customers from 160+ countries in the world was a tough task. Traditionally, it would require at least three touchpoints to coordinate and qualify prospects with the old inbound sales process.” 

This friction in the sales process was at odds with the company’s product-led growth strategy, and they needed a better way to coordinate and qualify discussions with potential customers. 

Katalon also needed to find a way to increase efficiency for the revenue team because while the customer base was growing, so too was the team. Katalon grew its employee base more than 3X over the course of a year and a half. 

The solution

Empower customers to schedule calls instantly

Katalon trusted Calendly as an industry leader when they sought an automatic scheduling tool. They knew they needed something that could work across time zones and speed up their workflow.

Katalon’s growth team quickly added Calendly to the form on their website and began using it to simplify the lead nurturing process.“Before Calendly, our website form would send an email to the sales team, and they could take 24 to 48 hours to respond. But now, we allow customers to set up a call in real time with Calendly. It’s seamless for somebody to see the time zones that reflect their own in Calendly,” Daisy noted.  

Automatic scheduling has sped up the Katalon workflow, and Daisy added that “what we’ve seen is that when we get a prospect on a call they convert a lot higher and a lot faster. Calendly significantly reduces our sales cycle.” Along the way, they’ve used sales data to optimize the process with the help of Calendly features. 

“One of the things that we track for our inbound BDR team are no shows,” Daisy says. “You’ll often see that prospects schedule a call weeks in advance, and when the time comes, it will be out of mind. So based on that learning, we set a rule where customers cannot book a call within six hours before the meeting or beyond two weeks.” 

In addition to custom scheduling parameters, Katalon uses automatic meeting reminders to ensure prospects don’t forget about an upcoming demo or discussion. 

The results

Seamless inbound conversations increase conversions

The ease of using Calendly serves Katalon’s customers and team, which has been integral as the company navigates growth. Daisy said that “the ROI comes from being able to reduce friction from prospects ensuring that the team is spending time wisely.”

Currently, conversions from Calendly-sourced leads are two to three times higher than other lead sources, and around half of all inbound leads come through their website via Calendly. Calendly’s scheduling parameters and automatic reminders have reduced Katalon’s no-show rate by half, and the team maintains a 93% participation rate on discovery calls month over month.  

The Katalon team also uses Calendly internally to manage the account executives’ workload. 

“Our AE team has seen a lot of growth in the past year,” Daisy shared. “We created a Calendly for the solution consultants team with individual scheduling links for the different locations, either in the U.S, EMEA, or APAC. It has helped us tremendously in cutting back the internal Slack messages and emails trying to schedule calls, and the team has welcomed it.”

Calendly’s ease of use makes it easy for new hires to adopt and empowers the growth team to funnel more leads onto calls with a proven system to convert customers faster. 

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