Scaling up regionally in Southeast Asia to meet client demands and the rapidly expanding creator economy is a massive operational undertaking. Digital solutions and technology are essential to delivering on this scale.

HEPMIL Media Group started with a single viral meme to become a leader in creator-led campaigns, managing content creators and digital marketing across Southeast Asia.

Client-centricity is key to HEPMIL's business, and it has built its success on solving clients’ problems and delivering impactful campaigns. However, as the company expanded its footprint to serve hundreds of brands and agencies, its operations became heavily reliant on manual processes and disparate documents.

Disconnected spreadsheets and personal messaging apps slowed down workflow and hand-offs between business development, account services, and finance teams. It was also difficult to gain real-time visibility into business performance. To drive efficient growth, HEPMIL needed to integrate its apps and data to automate workflows and streamline campaign delivery.

Salesforce provides an integrated ecosystem to power sales and delivery. 

With Salesforce, HEPMIL has built a tightly integrated ecosystem that streamlines sales and connects every step of a campaign, from the moment a client shares a brief all the way to paying the content creators. For example, enquiries submitted via all HEPMIL’s brand websites flow directly into Agentforce Sales (formerly Sales Cloud), and a business development lead in each country assigns a team member to follow up. When that lead shares a brief, it is entered into Agentforce Sales, and an automated workflow triggers the creation of necessary campaign folders in Google Drive.

As campaign delivery progresses, Agentforce Sales works in tandem with DocuSign and Airwallex to automate the creation of contracts and the payment of creators. 

Agentforce Sales also integrates with Xero via MuleSoft to automate invoicing and reconciliation of client payments. 

By eliminating silos and manual processes, this integrated ecosystem ensures secure, seamless data handoffs between business development, account services, and finance teams. Instead of chasing down administrative paperwork or payment approvals, employees can also dedicate their energy to fulfilling the client's creative needs and delivering campaign value.

Tasks such as creating creator contracts have also been fully automated. The contracts used to be manually generated and processed by finance, involving a few hours of admin and taking up to three months. Now, thanks to the deep integration between Salesforce and DocuSign, contracts can be processed in real-time with no human inputs required. This has reduced the completion period to an average of less than one day.

By focusing on scaling operations rather than simply measuring savings, HEPMIL has required minimal headcount growth while boosting productivity and efficiency as the business has expanded.

Data 360 and Shield ensure a trusted foundation of data 

As Hepmil expanded, users often created multiple versions of the same customer records across different regions. This fragmentation blurred internal reporting and made it difficult for leadership to gain an accurate view of the business. 

For example, where account teams previously had to cross-reference multiple spreadsheets manually to track brand relationships, HEPMIL now builds its sales dashboards directly into Tableau. The team is currently in the final stages of optimising its use of Data 360 to aggregate historical sales data across multiple platforms. By unlocking a unified view across all creators, this integration allows HEPMIL to analyse historical demand against average market pricing. Once fully live, the project will empower newly emerging creators to position themselves strategically and ensure they are fairly compensated for their content.

To protect its data, Shield provides robust event monitoring to mitigate threats, encrypts sensitive information, and ensures the company maintains strict enterprise-grade data retention controls.

Tableau informs decision-making to drive business momentum. 

With Agentforce Sales and Tableau, leadership has gained real-time visibility into pipeline health, client demand, and employee workload to drive data-driven decision-making. For example, they can track whether a client's spending has shifted over time, enabling account teams to identify new opportunities and take a proactive approach to customer engagement. They can also restructure their creative teams to meet current demand.

Beyond tracking revenue, HEPMIL uses Tableau to monitor the health of its workforce. The business has developed customised workload heatmaps that score the effort required for current campaign deliverables. This allows managers to proactively distribute tasks, ensuring employees are engaged and ready to deliver top-tier client service without risking burnout.

Slack brings people, data, and apps together to help teams stay focused and informed. 

Before centralising communication, HEPMIL’s workflow was fragmented across various messaging apps. This not only created security risks but also meant that crucial client knowledge was often lost if an employee exited the business. Today, Slack serves as the company's secure digital headquarters. Acting as the central nervous system for the Digital Innovation Services team, Slack empowers the technology operations of HEPMIL. Everything is connected and automated, and information sharing is real-time. empowering the technology of HEPMIL. 

There are also custom workflows in Slack that automatically spin up dedicated channels and pull in the right people the moment a new campaign is launched in the CRM. 

Slack’s automation capabilities even extend to physical events. For example, HEPMIL’s event management system integrates with Slack, so that the moment a guest checks in at an event, an automated alert is sent directly to the host's channel, ensuring a prompt greeting. 

Employees can also instantly retrieve historical project context with a simple keyword search. For example, if a team member needs a specific campaign detail, they can simply ask Slackbot to pull up all messages related to a keyword, instantly retrieving the exact information they need.

Salesforce provides HEPMIL Media Group with all the building blocks to operate as an agentic enterprise. Agentforce Sales acts as a system of record, centralising the entire client lifecycle and campaign delivery onto a single platform. Data 360 provides a system of context by consolidating customer intelligence into unified customer profiles, so every recommendation and action is informed by complete, accurate data across all six markets. Tableau acts as a system of insight, helping leadership make data-driven decisions. Slack serves as the system of engagement, securely connecting the workforce and preserving historical project knowledge. 

As the company continues to scale, it is exploring the benefits of Agentforce as its system of agency for autonomously executing administrative workflows.

When sharing learnings from the business’s transformation, Chiang Ling Yi, Regional Head of Digital Ops at HEPMIL Media Group, emphasised the benefits of Salesforce’s extensive capabilities."When you reach a new hurdle, you don't always have to custom-build things yourself. Salesforce has a ton of tools to grow your business, including different products to support different stages of your business needs."

HEPMIL’s Salesforce implementation has been driven by an in-house development team and IT leadership, alongside Salesforce partners. While the team could have designed a custom solution from scratch, leadership championed a mindset of speed and operational efficiency, with the consensus that time could be spent more meaningfully on solving client problems rather than reinventing the wheel.

The business has adopted a ‘buy, build, borrow, bot’ framework to scale its capabilities. 

To execute this, HEPMIL has worked closely with Salesforce to navigate technical challenges and integrate external apps to build a customised, scalable ecosystem.

HEPMIL is now focused on the ‘bot’ pillar of this framework to further augment its workforce. For example, to reduce administrative burden and save teams’ time for client-focused work, the business continues to innovate and experiment with  Agentforce.

"As the creator economy continues its rapid growth, with an increasing number of creators entering the space and the complexity of business operations generating a significant volume of administrative tasks, the adoption of Agentforce looks promising in scaling up to meet these evolving business needs," says Mushi Luke, Chief Intelligence Officer, HEPMIL Media Group. “By reimagining workforce dynamics and leveraging AI technologies like Agentforce, we are paving the way for a more labour-efficient, innovative, and sustainable approach to managing growth and complexity."