Ecovadis
“With Salesforce, everyone feels like they are part of one team focused on one mission.”
180 000
targeted customer journey emails sent per quarter
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EcoVadis helps more organisations achieve their sustainability goals faster with Salesforce
When we (or the business we work for) buy a new product or service, use a road or bridge, pay our electricity bill, travel for work or pleasure, we’re also buying into its supply chain. But some supply chains are more sustainable than others. From tackling climate change to improving human rights, global supply chains are critical to the evolution of our planet and society. And EcoVadis wants to ensure that every supply chain is the best it can be.
As the world’s largest and most trusted provider of business sustainability ratings, it has screened around €1.14 trillion worth of global spend across supply chains of more than 600 large multinational organisations (including Salesforce!). “We want to help companies and their trading partners improve their environmental, social, and ethical performance,” explained Christine MacDonald, Director of Marketing Operations & Demand Generation for EcoVadis. “With Salesforce, we can transform more supply chains and build a more sustainable world.”
As the world’s largest and most trusted provider of business sustainability ratings, it has screened around €1.14 trillion worth of global spend across supply chains of more than 600 large multinational organisations (including Salesforce!). “We want to help companies and their trading partners improve their environmental, social, and ethical performance,” explained Christine MacDonald, Director of Marketing Operations & Demand Generation for EcoVadis. “With Salesforce, we can transform more supply chains and build a more sustainable world.”
Empowering people to work as one team with 360-degree visibility
Since it was founded in 2007, EcoVadis has rated more than 75,000 companies in 160 countries. And it wants to keep growing that number to create a powerful network effect. “As the urgency around sustainability develops, the opportunity for growth is massive,” commented MacDonald. “With Salesforce, we can help more companies and their suppliers achieve their sustainability ambitions and redefine our planet’s future.”
Suppliers, who sign up to a subscription service with EcoVadis, are critical to enabling this change. The EcoVadis Score enables them to benchmark their practices against their peers and work with their enterprise customers to continuously improve performance. To reach and rate more businesses, EcoVadis needs to empower its 800+ employees to work faster and smarter. And that means pushing digitalisation, automation, and collaboration to the max.
EcoVadis has been using Salesforce since 2016 to help optimise its processes and connect its people. “With Salesforce, everyone feels like they are part of one team focused on one mission,” explained MacDonald. “From nurturing prospects to managing accounts, Salesforce underpins the entire customer journey and provides our teams with 360-degree visibility of thousands of relationships and interactions.”
Suppliers, who sign up to a subscription service with EcoVadis, are critical to enabling this change. The EcoVadis Score enables them to benchmark their practices against their peers and work with their enterprise customers to continuously improve performance. To reach and rate more businesses, EcoVadis needs to empower its 800+ employees to work faster and smarter. And that means pushing digitalisation, automation, and collaboration to the max.
EcoVadis has been using Salesforce since 2016 to help optimise its processes and connect its people. “With Salesforce, everyone feels like they are part of one team focused on one mission,” explained MacDonald. “From nurturing prospects to managing accounts, Salesforce underpins the entire customer journey and provides our teams with 360-degree visibility of thousands of relationships and interactions.”
EcoVadis transforms supplier onboarding process
To promote sustainable procurement strategies and supply chains, businesses need to ensure all their trading partners are following the latest best practices. For large enterprise customers that can involve gaining buy-in from hundreds of suppliers around the world. “We need to be able to onboard suppliers as quickly and seamlessly as possible, but fragmented systems and siloed information were holding us back,” explained MacDonald. “We needed a new approach that would enable us to operate at scale and with speed.”
In 2020, EcoVadis integrated Sales Cloud with its custom database and migrated across more than 80,000 supplier companies and 100,000 contact records. The project was completed in just six months with support from the Salesforce Customer Success Group.
In 2020, EcoVadis integrated Sales Cloud with its custom database and migrated across more than 80,000 supplier companies and 100,000 contact records. The project was completed in just six months with support from the Salesforce Customer Success Group.
Greater visibility enables smarter decisions
Supplier relationships can now be managed alongside enterprise customer accounts, which enables teams to access richer insights and make smarter decisions. For example, onboarding specialists can see if suppliers have attended webinars or downloaded thought leadership content, which helps them prioritise follow-ups. EcoVadis can also update its enterprise customers on the onboarding status of their trading partners and create targeted marketing campaigns to boost engagement.
To gain visibility of suppliers’ financial transactions, EcoVadis has started to integrate Sales Cloud with Salesforce Configure, Revenue Cloud. “The finance team will be able to track payments and upgrades across thousands of suppliers, which will be key as we offer more self-service options,” added MacDonald.
To gain visibility of suppliers’ financial transactions, EcoVadis has started to integrate Sales Cloud with Salesforce Configure, Revenue Cloud. “The finance team will be able to track payments and upgrades across thousands of suppliers, which will be key as we offer more self-service options,” added MacDonald.
Smarter processes drive efficiency and growth
In just six months, the new digitalised process has helped EcoVadis increase supplier conversion rates and reduce onboarding times. With around 2,000 new suppliers joining the network every month, that’s a massive time saving for EcoVadis. But MacDonald wants to push the efficiency boundaries even further. “We want to digitalise as many of our processes as possible,” she explained. “With Salesforce, we can increase our use of automated journeys and predictive analytics.”
EcoVadis has already started to use Tableau CRM, a visual analytics tool, to track key financial indicators and spot new investment opportunities. “With Tableau CRM, we can identify if we are signing up more suppliers in specific industries and countries,” said MacDonald. “These insights will help to shape future growth strategies.”
EcoVadis has already started to use Tableau CRM, a visual analytics tool, to track key financial indicators and spot new investment opportunities. “With Tableau CRM, we can identify if we are signing up more suppliers in specific industries and countries,” said MacDonald. “These insights will help to shape future growth strategies.”
Personalisation boosts prospect engagement
Sharing the right content with the right stakeholders at the right time is imperative to improving environmental, social, and ethical performance. And EcoVadis is constantly connecting with new stakeholders across a range of channels. It captures around 160 new prospects a day via Pardot – and they all need to be qualified and nurtured. “We need to ensure we are engaging with companies that are committed to creating a more sustainable future,” said MacDonald. “With Sales Cloud and Pardot, we can score, grade, and prioritise new leads more effectively.”
To enrich the customer journey, EcoVadis has integrated Pardot with its content management system and created more than 70 automation rules and 500 forms to capture prospect information and intent allowing it to run custom nurture campaigns. The marketing team sends around 180,000 emails per quarter to both existing customers and prospects, which are personalised based on their previous engagements and their lifecycle stage.
“With Sales Cloud and Pardot, we can execute omnichannel campaigns that achieve measurable results,” commented MacDonald. And the results are impressive: nearly half of the 12,000 marketing qualified leads received per year go on to become sales accepted leads.
Insights captured during the demand generation process are shared with the sales team so they can seamlessly take over the relationship. “We want to learn as much as we can about our prospects and their sustainability challenges,” said MacDonald. “With Demandbase, a Salesforce AppExchange solution, we can even provide teams with visibility of a customer’s online search terms and overall engagement.”
To enrich the customer journey, EcoVadis has integrated Pardot with its content management system and created more than 70 automation rules and 500 forms to capture prospect information and intent allowing it to run custom nurture campaigns. The marketing team sends around 180,000 emails per quarter to both existing customers and prospects, which are personalised based on their previous engagements and their lifecycle stage.
“With Sales Cloud and Pardot, we can execute omnichannel campaigns that achieve measurable results,” commented MacDonald. And the results are impressive: nearly half of the 12,000 marketing qualified leads received per year go on to become sales accepted leads.
Insights captured during the demand generation process are shared with the sales team so they can seamlessly take over the relationship. “We want to learn as much as we can about our prospects and their sustainability challenges,” said MacDonald. “With Demandbase, a Salesforce AppExchange solution, we can even provide teams with visibility of a customer’s online search terms and overall engagement.”
Pandemic puts supply chains and sustainability in the spotlight
Smarter processes and richer insights helped EcoVadis scale up quickly during the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed vulnerabilities in global supply chains. “The pandemic accelerated conversations about tackling global issues, such as climate change and employee wellbeing,” said MacDonald. “As a result, we’re onboarding more enterprise customers and suppliers than ever before.”
The successful execution of a sustainability programme can help organisations not only improve their environmental, social, and ethical performance but also boost competitive advantage. Around 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand with a reputation for sustainability, while 91% of businesses take sustainability criteria into account when making purchasing decisions1.
The successful execution of a sustainability programme can help organisations not only improve their environmental, social, and ethical performance but also boost competitive advantage. Around 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand with a reputation for sustainability, while 91% of businesses take sustainability criteria into account when making purchasing decisions1.
App helps organisations achieve their goals faster
To help its enterprise customers benchmark and accelerate their sustainable procurement journey, EcoVadis has developed an online app on Salesforce. The app, which was built in just four months by a single developer, provides customers with recommendations on how to drive better outcomes. “It can be difficult to turn a vision for a sustainable supply chain into an actionable programme,” explained MacDonald. “Our customer success team uses the insights captured in the app to help organisations drive continuous improvement.”
This application, called EcoVadis Sustainable Procurement Maturity Review, will be one of the drivers for EcoVadis’ customer success team to recommend tailored solutions, content, and eLearning to support its customers’ sustainability journey.
This application, called EcoVadis Sustainable Procurement Maturity Review, will be one of the drivers for EcoVadis’ customer success team to recommend tailored solutions, content, and eLearning to support its customers’ sustainability journey.
Putting sustainability at the heart of every business decision
To accelerate the implementation of new features and integrations, MacDonald and her team draw on the expertise of the Salesforce Customer Success Group. They have also created Trailmixes on Trailhead, Salesforce’s free online learning platform, to help colleagues explore the platform’s potential. “You have to be able to understand a system to be able to innovate,” added MacDonald.
And EcoVadis has plenty of innovations in the pipeline. For example, it wants to extend its use of Salesforce CPQ & Billing [FH1] to streamline the creation of quotes for its enterprise customers, who often sign up to multi-year contracts and additional modules, which include predictive risk mapping, audit management, and a carbon action module.
EcoVadis also plans to use Tableau CRM to visualise and optimise different stages of the supplier onboarding lifecycle. “We want to help our teams unlock the data they need to keep transforming our processes and enriching customer journeys,” said MacDonald. “With Salesforce, we can scale faster.”
The more companies and trading partners that join the EcoVadis network, the bigger the impact on the world’s supply chains. “Everything we do has to ramp up to a global sustainability impact, so it’s essential that we digitise and optimize every data set and customer touchpoint,” said MacDonald. “With Salesforce, we can create a global marketplace where sustainability intelligence influences every business decision – improving economies, enriching people’s lives, and protecting the planet.”
1 Source: EcoVadis website
And EcoVadis has plenty of innovations in the pipeline. For example, it wants to extend its use of Salesforce CPQ & Billing [FH1] to streamline the creation of quotes for its enterprise customers, who often sign up to multi-year contracts and additional modules, which include predictive risk mapping, audit management, and a carbon action module.
EcoVadis also plans to use Tableau CRM to visualise and optimise different stages of the supplier onboarding lifecycle. “We want to help our teams unlock the data they need to keep transforming our processes and enriching customer journeys,” said MacDonald. “With Salesforce, we can scale faster.”
The more companies and trading partners that join the EcoVadis network, the bigger the impact on the world’s supply chains. “Everything we do has to ramp up to a global sustainability impact, so it’s essential that we digitise and optimize every data set and customer touchpoint,” said MacDonald. “With Salesforce, we can create a global marketplace where sustainability intelligence influences every business decision – improving economies, enriching people’s lives, and protecting the planet.”
1 Source: EcoVadis website
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