Introducing Managed Events: Improve team consistency and lift performance

Today Calendly announces its newest feature — Managed Events — which allows team managers to lock and sync meeting templates across teams. Managed Events empowers managers to enforce best practices in a way that most scheduling automation tools can’t. The feature enables consistent customer experiences and more reliable business outcomes, so you’re quicker to close deals, book services, and land candidates. 

With Managed Events, you’re more equipped to identify and repair weak links in your processes. Plus, you can pinpoint your top performers’ tactics, and painlessly push them out to the entire team.

Templates evolve to keep your team’s quality bar high

Managed Events — which let admins assign and lock Event Type details — make it easy for your team to follow best practices right out of the gate. Instead of giving direction and hoping your team members follow it, using Managed Events is a surefire way to get everyone on the same page. 

Locked templates were our No. 1 feature request from Calendly’s largest customers for good reason. Managed Events deliver on that request and empower you to:

• Standardize best practices

• Keep your scheduling playbook up to date

• Quickly onboard your team

Managed Events are the natural evolution of Calendly’s Templates feature, giving managers more control and peace of mind. Enhancements include an assignments dashboard, the ability to assign templates by group memberships, locking sections, and automatically pushing updates to all assigned team members.

Standardize your team’s best practices to improve results

You may have designed elegant processes, but if your team isn’t using them consistently, they don’t work. 

Covetrus, an animal health and technology services company, helped beta test Managed Events. The new feature has helped Covetrus operationalize not just customer-facing interactions, but their employee onboarding as well, said Jason Rojas, Covetrus’ Senior Business Program Manager of Sales Operations.

Prior to Managed Events, each sales team member took their own approach. “Folks were editing and creating their own Event Types,” Jason said. “This led to a disjointed, disparate customer experience wholly dependent on what rep you were speaking to.”

Managed Events took the guesswork out of what Event Types reps should be using, and allowed Covetrus to streamline the customer experience across the entire organization.

Keep your playbook up to date

With Managed Events, you can enforce tried and tested workflows, test new ones, and proceed with the strategies that drive your desired outcomes. 

Let’s say you’ve already integrated Salesforce with Calendly, so your meeting details automatically update in your CRM. You’re updating processes, and have decided you want all your Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) to ask the exact same three discovery questions in their meeting invites. 

When you assign and lock those questions in Calendly’s Managed Events, the data will flow into Salesforce where you can easily sort and report. If those questions aren’t locked, and SDRs make up their own questions or forget the questions entirely, gathering and analyzing the data from those questions will be difficult. 

By locking event details such as meeting descriptions, invitee questions, and notifications, you control how sales and other customer-facing teams schedule 1:1 and Group meetings for discovery calls, demos, webinars, and more. 

The new assignment dashboard lets you view and manage the status of all assigned events in one central location — no more guessing who is using what.

A faster employee onboarding experience

Every time you onboard an employee, you have to train them and get them set up with all of your tools. It’s tiring and time consuming, and especially urgent during today’s record-breaking turnover rates. Then after everyone’s finally set up, you send out an update, and half your team misses the memo. 

Your team feels the pain, too, because every moment spent doing admin is a moment they’re not selling, serving customers, or filling open positions. According to Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index, 83% of knowledge workers feel they aren’t as efficient as they could be because they don’t have the right processes in place. 

With Managed Events, you can assign Event Types in three ways — to individuals, by group membership, or with settings so new team members are automatically assigned specific Managed Events during onboarding. When you update an Event Type that’s assigned to your entire Sales team, the update pushes out to the entire team automatically. That’s real-time playbook consistency. 

When Calendly customer Covetrus started using Managed Events, they relieved issues created by the high turnover happening across industries nationwide. Employee turnover makes it tough for companies to onboard new team members quickly, and to enforce consistent standards for client interactions. 

“Now we’re not reliant on specific people, or on onboarding being done in a certain way,” Jason said. 

Covetrus is getting such great results, and has found the tool so easy to use, they’re updating many of their 1:1 and Group Event Types to Managed Events.

Examples: How teams put Managed Events to work

Whether you lead a team in sales, customer success, or recruiting, Managed Events can help your team work more effectively.

Sales teams

1:1 SDR Demo Event Type 

SDRs are typically early in their career and require more guidance. They really benefit from the structure that Managed Events provide. In your 1:1 SDR Demo Event Type, you can set and lock things like custom invitee questions and email meeting reminders. After your SDRs start identifying trends — like prospects' most common objections, or which selling points resonate — you can hone those questions and instantly push out your updates to the entire team.

Customer Success teams

Group Trainings Event Type 

After onboarding, thorough training and regular touchpoints with customers are crucial to improve retention and reduce churn. This is done largely by listening to the customer’s pain points and identifying solutions within the product. 

Ideally, you want everyone to show up. Locking best practice notifications — such as a 24-hour reminder email with a rescheduling option — lowers the chance of no-shows and excessive delays.

Recruiting teams

1:1 Candidate Screening Event Type 

You want candidates to feel excited and confident about your company. So it’s important to keep them well-informed as they move through the hiring process. 

Follow-up details are key for successful recruiting, and they’re one of the easiest things to forget. You can also lock preset, personal follow-up emails that include helpful resources for the candidate and keeps momentum going after a great interview. It’s a great opportunity to set expectations for the interview, and explain what happens after the interview.

How Managed Events work

Managed Events are reusable 1:1 and Group Event Types that admins can edit, lock, update, and assign to users. Only account owners and admins can edit and assign Managed Events. You’ll find step-by-step instructions on how to create and assign Managed Events in our Help Center. 

As Calendly transitions from Templates to Managed Events, our Teams and Enterprise users will enjoy all the functionality of Templates, plus four new, in-demand features: 

• Lock sections — By locking a section, you also lock all the details belonging to that section. For example, if you lock the “What event is this?” section, you’ll lock the event name, description, and link. 

• Update and sync — Your changes are automatically pushed to assigned users.

• Assign by group — To speed things up, you can assign a Managed Event to multiple users at once, like your entire recruiting team.

• View assignment status — An updated dashboard lets admins review Managed Events assignment status in a centralized place.

If you have a Teams or Enterprise plan: Your Calendly account already has access to Managed Events, including all premium functionalities. Only admins and owners can create and edit Managed Events.

If you have a free or Standard plan: Managed Events is only one of many reasons to consider upgrading, especially if you work on a team. If you want to access the new Managed Events features, upgrade to a Teams plan now. 

Already an admin or owner of a Teams or Enterprise account? Start using Managed Events now. 

Top performers automate more tasks

The truth is, some people on your team will always be more detail-oriented than others. 

Meeting time mix-ups, typos, forgotten discovery questions … they add up to make your company look inconsistent and unprofessional. Worse yet, if your team isn’t consistent with customers or prospects, these errors have the potential to disrupt your sales funnel and impact revenue and retention

As a manager you need everyone to operate at the company standard, with the same quality and consistency. From research we know top performers automate more tasks than underperformers. So building easy, repeatable processes is key, especially for hybrid and distributed teams. 

Managed Events lets admins establish and enforce best practices. It’s easier for your team, because they can grab-and-go Event Types with confidence. It’s easier for you, too, because you have reassurance that workflows are happening as designed.

Thinking about upgrading to a Teams or Enterprise account? Talk to Sales about the business reasons a Calendly upgrade is a smart investment.