So I ended up with a 10% increase in CU but flat activations and my overall revenue decreased around 30%? I'm in a Western mountain state. How did everyone else end up?
9 replies (most recent on top)
@11jD0QRU-3mzx There WAS a great market research team whose feedback was ignored because their customer data wasn't telling the execs what they wanted to hear. They were eventually shown the door by the current CMO.
@11jD0QRU-3gmt Haha...yep. Not a competitor, but a former 15 year Cengage employee that left on my own because I saw the current train wreck coming. I worked on the product side, and watched over and over as customer feedback was ignored in favor of whatever flavor of the month clueless product directors and VPs were pushing. I got so fed up I left and went to a company in a different industry where customer input is sought and the products are successful. What a concept! Cengage's biggest problem is that they look down on their customers (instructors) because they are viewed as too "stodgy" and "stuck in the past." They don't know what they want until the enlightened Cengage geniuses show them a product that is just a copy of a copy of something they saw in the tech industry (Netflix for textbooks!). I laugh at every apocalyptic quarterly earnings statement because most people who are left are getting exactly what they deserve.
@11jD0QRU-3gmt I am like many - a former Cengager who now works for a competitor. Yes, there is more than enough to keep one quite busy but watching the slow-motion Cengage trainwreck is something of a fun hobby, truth be told. It is astonishing how mis-guided and out-of-touch that company has become! At times, it feels we're being punked - as in, "no - really, THAT can't be true!" To their credit, I do run into Cengage reps more than those from other PubCos while on campus, but they don't seem to gain much traction, at least not in the disciplines I work with. It's the entire business model, it just has nothing at all to do with what profs and students actually want. Sure, they will sell you a naked book - for $300 or more per new copy. THAT right there is dumbfounding! Want to save some money? Okay - you can have this eBook for $120 via CU or $130 via IA or whatever it is - AND you have to take the broken and clunky Mindtap along with it! But no one wants Mindtap, it's confusing and it doesn't work, can't I just get a book? Sure! We'll rent you one for only $90 - just send it back in pristine condition! But but - no, I don't want to rent, I just want to buy a book and maybe keep it or maybe sell it back - OH! No sell-backs, there is a new edition out now, so no buy-backs! Wait - didn't you just release a new edition 13 months ago? Yes, but it was time for an update! See this picture on page 36? It is on page 41 now - new edition! Gotta trust me on this one if you are still with Cengage, I was there twenty years and I WAS a kool-aid drinker for a few of those years. I really, truly thought I was making a difference out there - "changing the way the world learns" don't ya know! Then I was let go in one of the many waves of change, just so that the company could hire a newbie in at $30,000 less than I was making. That person left after less than a year and that position had turned over 2 more times in five years! I revisit my old accounts in my new role and - poof! - all of those adoptions I won, they are all gone now. More than 80% of them. Gone to competitors. Publishing sales, this is hugely relationship-based. Faculty like having a dependable, longer-term rep they know they can rely on. Again, Sales 101, if you will. And yet at Cengage reps are chewed up and churned through at a very regular rate. Corporate stupidity. It is amazing what happens when you step away and begin to view that entity from the outside looking in. Talk to faculty and to bookstores and to students, you begin to feel a little embarrassed that you were once a true-believer. It is literally like within Cengage, it is believed that the world is red when, in reality, the world is colored green. But don't tell that to a Cengager - they have those glasses on and they don't even know what it is to be green (P.S. not everyone, there are some wise heads within the company still, but they remain silent, of course). Here is a true story to close: a co-worker was working with Inside Sales within Cengage and had applied for a local outside position that had opened up. The direct-sales manager called the rep in to discuss the possible promotion and then finally admitted: you are more than qualified for this outside position and if you decide that you really want to go for it, I will back you up 1000%. . . but I would like to be honest with you. If you move outside? They will chew you up and spit you back out within eighteen months. PLEASE do whatever you want to do here, but I would be remiss if I did not offer you that truth." Guess what? The rep chose to join my company, instead. AND (s)he made a $45,000+ bonus check during the first year with this company, on top of a salary $13,000 more than Cengage would have paid for the outside territory the rep wanted to interview for. THERE'S your reality, bud.
I love that competitors are commenting on these posts. If you're with a "competitor" chances are you have enough to worry about. You may want to mind your own and handle your own business.
Also, CU is not going to make sense at every account or with every adoption, which is why the IA option is a valid source of revenue for a number of Cengage territories. Anyone with sense should know when to leverage CU vs. IA.
"what the disconnected Hanson failed to realize is that universities don't work like that (Chem prof is NOT calling an English prof, proposing mutual Cengage adoptions, lol) and that, while price is an important factor, it is not the ONLY factor."
How does such a basic fact about your customers go unrecognized at a company as big as Cengage? Do they not have a market research team?
@11jD0QRU-kfi To be honest, in my role as a Cengage competitor, I have to say that IA has proven to be the CU k–ler. It's a simple matter of math. I haven't encountered that many CU-interested profs (could count them on one hand and still manage to successfully hold a pickle), but the moment you lay out pricing associated with IA, any and all thought that CU might represent any kind of "deal" is immediately dashed. CU was a cheap gimmick designed to grab market-share, but of course what the disconnected Hanson failed to realize is that universities don't work like that (Chem prof is NOT calling an English prof, proposing mutual Cengage adoptions, lol) and that, while price is an important factor, it is not the ONLY factor. Thankfully, CU has been recognized as the cheap gimmick it actually is and most profs have not given it a second thought . . .
With the CU increase of 10% it's clear that Cengage Unlimited continues to be massively popular and is changing the industry one student at a time.
Verdict is still out. IA is still out there and apparently IAC's from BN and Follett's POS. It definitely would be nice to have more transparency- and NO the new dashboard does not offer this.
I saved students thousands of dollars, so I'll surely get a bonus.