No-code application development revolutionizes sales process for classic cosmetic brand

Situation

With thirty-plus brands, more than a thousand sales reps, and thousands of retail locations to manage, a global manufacturer and marketer of high-end beauty products was struggling to communicate efficiently with its salesforce.

This Fortune 500 company’s 70-year-old reputation was on the line, putting corporate leadership under pressure to find a solution that would enable reps to receive timely information, focus on essential tasks, and prioritize business activities with ease.

Their goal was a newly empowered, tightly focused salesforce that could deliver a seamless, reliable, and highly personal customer experience in retail locations worldwide.

Challenges

The company’s brand teams were communicating guidelines, data, and instructions – including promotional materials, retailer training information, and sales analytics – to sales reps via email.

Sales reps were inundated with documents and spending significant time in digging information. This time could have been used to visit stores and educate counter staff. As a result, they were unable to fully execute the crucial work of reviewing sales numbers and goals, presenting new products, and helping with promotions.

Time-sensitive promotions sometimes got lost in the fray and were skipped altogether. As a result, customers were missing out on the prestige experience that underlies the company’s reputation.

The crucial feedback information from store visits about staff education, performance, needs etc. was scattershot and difficult to analyze.

To ensure that reps spent less time dealing with email overflow and more time in stores – the right stores – the company’s sales, communications, and marketing processes needed major updates

Solution

This company chose the Optymyze no-code unified platform to enhance and automate its communications processes for disseminating promotional and seasonal materials, to handle corporate communications, to guide rep behavior with detailed sales reports, and to manage retailer data.

The company took just five weeks to configure and roll out the initial implementation – but that was only the beginning. Then it started building on that foundation, rolling out no-code applications to make those vital communication processes more efficient and achieve valuable outcomes faster.

In the span of just two months, the company built highly detailed, color-coded, prioritized calendar and mapping applications for the sales force to identify the most valuable stores and promotions. Through the power of sales performance data, the company’s reps now know which brands at which stores need their attention, and how often.

An easy and convenient-to-use mobile application offers all the daily planning information sales reps need to succeed, making it easy to prioritize and organize their working hours.

A standardized form, tailored to each brand and retailer, enables salespeople to provide feedback and share their in-store perspective. The company’s product managers use this feedback to gain actionable insight into what works and what doesn’t. For example, if a particular retailer needs more or different training for its counter people, product managers add sessions or tailor methods. The ultimate result is a more professional, complete, and uniform customer experience.

Outcome

The accurate and up-to-date data has enabled the salesforce to become more agile, helping the company ensure that in-store product representations and promotions remain aligned with digital campaigns.

The increasingly personalized and targeted marketing activities have raised the level of consistency in corporate messaging for retailers and customers alike. The result is that the company has been able to both retain and expand its customer base, leading to increased sales.

Reps are now receiving 60% fewer emails while still getting all the information they need and no longer wasting time sifting through irrelevant or outdated correspondence. With a single, unified, no-code platform as the central point of contact for product managers and sales reps, administrative overhead costs have decreased.

The more streamlined communication has made sales coaching more effective. With full, real-time visibility into their salespeople’s daily activities, product managers now drive increased productivity.

The company’s sales reps are now spending 47% more time in stores – the equivalent of adding nearly 500 experienced reps, with none of the associated costs or risks.

Their in-store time is more impactful due to the visualizations that give reps valuable insight into brand performance, including the ability to filter by product and category for precise and prescriptive insights.

That means the salesforce is able to form deeper in-store perspectives. These are shared with the management through the feedback application and used to generate actionable insights, like identifying when a particular retailer’s counter staff needs more or different training to ensure a professional, complete, and uniform customer experience.