ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA
“Online products let us be more intimate with customers. We communicate more frequently and respond to them better.”
A trusted educational leader embraces its digital future with Salesforce.
When Encyclopaedia Britannica president Jorge Cauz announced in 2012 that his company would stop printing books, the world took notice. After 244 years, the iconic reference publisher was going all-digital. While the news came as a shock to many outsiders, insiders weren’t at all surprised. “It was just the final phase of a carefully planned strategic transition that had been 35 years in the making,” Cauz wrote in the March 2013 issue of the Harvard Business Review. Indeed, employees in Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Chicago offices celebrated their company’s transition to the digital age, toasting the dawn of a new era. How does a centuries-old print publisher transform itself into a thriving technology company? For Encyclopaedia Britannica, the answer was a combination of smart business decisions, careful planning, and finding the right technology partners. Encyclopaedia Britannica had to decide not only what its digital products would look like, but also how to care for a new kind of customer.
“We weren’t just using digital tools to sell our products, but we actually started creating digital products.”
Swapping print dollars for digital pennies
Tools to turn a vendor into a partner
Selling to a vastly larger customer base exposed the limits of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s homegrown CRM system. The software didn’t integrate with the company’s other back-office systems, and it required considerable maintenance. “It was a pain in the butt,” Ross recalled. “It was critical to get into the cloud and get the systems talking to each other.” Encyclopaedia Britannica adopted Salesforce in 2012, beginning with Sales Cloud to address its critical CRM needs, and has since added Service Cloud, Chatter, Salesforce Platform, and Pardot across in-office and remote teams. Salesforce helped get sales and service reps sharing information, which is vital in a business built on relationships.
Encyclopaedia Britannica sales reps stay with customers throughout their lifecycles, and are often the ones users come to first with product questions. Because Sales Cloud and Service Cloud are integrated on one platform, it’s easy to share these inquiries across the company, so sales reps can quickly find answers for their customers. Ross estimated that without Salesforce, he’d probably need three full-time support staffers instead of the one-person department currently employed. “Do we have enough human customer support? Yes, because of Service Cloud,” he said. A big benefit of going all-digital is that Encyclopaedia Britannica now gains deeper insight into how customers use its products. “Online products let us be more intimate with customers. We communicate more frequently and respond to them better,” Ross said. From there, Service Cloud and Chatter make it easy to log customer feedback in real time and integrate it into the product development process. “We have products that have literally changed immediately because of things customers have suggested,” he said. “That really helps with customer loyalty.” As evidence, Director of Marketing and Sales Support Rick Booms cites Encyclopaedia Britannica’s strong social media sentiment scores and subscription renewal rates that top 95%. To keep that rate climbing, the company adopted Pardot in mid-2015 to help with onboarding and renewals. Ross said his teams will also use Pardot to get away from “batch and blast” emails, in favor of buyer’s journeys that help them better understand what their customers are really interested in.
Overall, profit margins have increased 8% since Salesforce adoption. Year-over-year profits in Ross’ group grew twice as fast, to 17% over the same time period. “I guarantee we couldn’t have done that without Salesforce,” he said. The group also started using Platform to further streamline how they work, beginning with importing accounting and invoicing data from legacy systems into Salesforce. Company leadership knows that despite early success as a technology company, their work is far from over. In an age where virtually unlimited free information is just a swipe and tap away, Ross sees value in having a trusted brand vet your information for you. “We’d love for everyone to be using Britannica again as the trusted source for information,” he said. “A ton of people still come to us based on trust — they know our information is credible.” In an age of near-unlimited access to information, you can’t put a price on having a source you can trust every time.