Jason M. Lemkin explains why sales and customer-facing teams need Calendly over Google Calendar. Calendly integrates with the broader sales tech stack, letting companies track scheduling as part of customer acquisition and optimize for business outcomes, not just individual productivity.
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So I think on the surface, scheduling looks like a one-size-fits-all problem, right? Like, you know, the scheduling needs of a teacher are the same as a sales rep, at least on the surface it seems like that, but as you dig a little bit deeper, I think what you begin to realize is that the needs of external-facing teams are, again, are very, very different from internal-facing professionals, or even, and especially sales teams, for example, right? It ends up looking like the scheduling needs end up sort of diverging by function and by role. And what we've done is really focus on people who are in external-facing roles. And that's how we end up winning. So there are people who want to use Calendly who maybe now use Google Calendar. But there's just as many who were using Calendly and still use Calendly because of one of the comments that he made earlier, the breadth of our integrations. So being able to integrate into everything in your customer-facing stack ends up meaning that Calendly is not just a scheduling product for you. It is part of a very important process, like how you acquire customers. You can, you can measure, you can track it, you can optimize for, you can optimize for a very specific business outcome as opposed to just purely productivity and efficiency in a nutshell.