How Calendly increased purchases under management by 35% while decreasing cycle times

Challenge

Calendly is the scheduling platform of choice for over 100 thousand companies and 20 million users.

Ivy Hershberg is the Senior Manager of Procurement at Calendly. She built the procurement function from the ground up alongside the Controller when she joined the organization in 2022.

Ivy’s team was using an online form for purchase requests and a modified version of their sales team’s CRM with a CLM overlay to run the request through an approval workflow. There was no integration to an invoice management or payment solution, no purchase orders in use, and email was the primary method of doing business with our internal stakeholders and third party vendors.

Calendly’s leadership team demanded improvements to spend visibility and sensible procurement controls. “I wanted to find a solution that would allow us to administer Procure-to-Pay end to end and manage changes over time without reliance on costly third-party consultants and developers.”

After reviewing a variety of vendors through their RFP process, Calendly selected Zip as the best partner to help bring Ivy’s vision to life.

Solution

Ivy partnered with her financial planning and analysis, infosec, privacy, and legal teams to identify the right approval workflows and use cases to maximize value for the business in partnership with Zip.

“Our implementation specialist made our onboarding with Zip a breeze. I enjoyed participating in the configuration and design work so that I could personally learn how to make adjustments and changes to workflows on my own. It was an empowering experience and helped me gain a greater understanding of how we could build upon our success over time.”

Department budget owners and Calendly’s executive team are brought into the approval workflows on a financial approval escalation basis. Additionally, their people operations team is involved in contractor approvals, along with Calendly’s IT and business systems team for ease of equipment and access provisioning. IT and business systems also reviews software and hardware requests for approval.

Ivy also worked with her team to integrate Zip’s sourcing product into Calendly’s existing systems.

“Zip’s sourcing offering is ideal in that it’s one part of the larger whole for engaging a third-party at Calendly. We don’t have to waste time on user training and the manual processes that would otherwise be involved in transitioning from an RFx event into a purchase request.”

Result

Feedback about usage from Zip across Calendly’s cross-functional stakeholders was incredibly positive from the start.

“There was truly not a negative comment spoken about Zip’s launch because it was so easy to use,” recalled Ivy. “It was such a dramatic improvement from our prior processes and systems.”

With Zip at the center of Calendly’s procurement operations, they saw a 35% increase in properly submitted purchase requests – while also slashing cycle time by 38%. “More work, done faster!” said Ivy.

Ivy continues to work with her team to deepen their usage of Zip. “Post-launch of Zip, we began finding and creating other use cases. We now have a vendor termination request workflow and an MNDA request workflow. Our punch out with CDW is the latest use case we’ve implemented,” Ivy said.

Calendly even managed building out their new office space through Zip. “We utilized Zip every step of the way, from the initiation of the lease negotiation through opening our doors,” said Ivy.

With Zip supporting and enhancing the day-to-day routines of procurement, Ivy’s team can now focus on spend analytics, sourcing strategy, risk assessment, and other objectives – putting them in a strategic position to move the needle on business metrics. As Ivy puts it, "Zip empowers procurement to maximize its value and realize optimal business outcomes for our stakeholders."