Lifes2good

Salesforce gives us the business intelligence and the agility we need to successfully grow our brands.”

-Olivia Forde, CTO Lifes2good
 

Building better brands with Salesforce

Lifes2good is passionate about improving people’s lives. Its success is built on discovering and bringing to market clinically proven health and beauty products that work inside and out, head to toe. “We acquire early-stage, high potential products and develop them into profitable and powerful brands,” explained Olivia Forde, CTO at Lifes2good. “We achieve this by leveraging consumer insights, developing the products, and investing in the science.”

When consumers buy products that have health or medicinal benefits, it is rarely an impulse purchase. Information, education, and reassurance are a big part of the sales process. Multi-channel communications, customer feedback, and the ability to adapt and change are therefore all key to ensuring the success of new products.

The company operates worldwide and through multiple channels: direct end-customer communications; via distributors and retailers; and through health and beauty professionals. “We must ensure our messaging is consistent yet personalised across different channels and multiple time-zones,” said Forde.

Capturing and analysing feedback from these customers is also vital to the company’s strategy, as Forde confirmed: “Developing products and new brands means we need to be able to understand trends, our cost of sale, and market changes, and adapt quickly in response to these insights if we need to.”

Simplifying sales with greater automation

Lifes2good has been using Salesforce since 2013, and it's now the central platform across the globe for sales, service and marketing to all three channels – consumers, retailers and professionals. “Salesforce pulls everything together regardless of where it is happening,” commented Forde. “Our staff around the world have real-time access to the same information. For every customer and every brand, they can see all relevant communications, including service requests, marketing emails, and sales orders.”

Maximising efficiency in sales is key to achieving its goals, as Forde explained: “Making brands competitive and profitable demands efficiency as well as agility,” said Forde. “The level of automation we have been able to achieve with Salesforce is driving up efficiency while driving down costs.”

Lifes2good has automated key workflows from order fulfilment and dispatch to credit applications and purchase order approval. “We can service customers far more efficiently now,” commented Forde. “For example, we’ve developed a tablet counter in Salesforce, so we know when customers will run out of a particular product and can automatically bill and ship the next pack.”

As well as providing automated notifications and greater visibility of customer information, Lifes2good can also work more effectively with its network of retailers, distributors, and partner. “We can pull information from other business systems in any format, which makes us easy to work with and avoids complex integrations,” said Forde.

Better business insights

Lifes2good wants to make the customer journey a seamless and satisfying experience at every stage. Using Marketing Cloud, the company can maintain regular contact with minimal effort. For example, Marketing Cloud automatically sends marketing emails to inform customers of special offers and, by using coupon codes, Lifes2good can relate these marketing efforts directly back to sales to evaluate the ROI of its campaigns.

And when a customer has a query or request, Service Cloud enables the company’s service agents in Galway to provide well-informed, knowledgeable responses. “We’ve just introduced Live Agent for web chat,” said Forde. “As well as offering customers more choice in how they engage with us, we will be able to capture the common questions asked by our customers and feed this back into our marketing and service processes.”

Sales, service, and marketing teams also shared information via Chatter, making it easy to deal with enquiries, orders, or service issues. The solution is also used by inhouse designers for artwork approvals.

Due to the nature of its business, good business intelligence is as vital as a good customer experience to Lifes2good. It must understand which brands are growing, where it’s succeeding, and where it needs to invest more resources. With Salesforce, the company has all the insights it needs to make good business decisions. “Salesforce doesn’t just help with the day-to-day organisation like sales targets and stock management, but guides our long-term plans,” explained Forde. “Purchase orders, advertising and marketing spend, even raw material costs, can be reported on by brand, making it easy to track costs and return on investment.”

The level of insight and efficiency now enjoyed by Lifes2good is playing a key role in the success of its brands. In 2016, the company grew sales of one of its leading products, Viviscal, by 33 percent and subsequently sold the brand to a leading US consumer business.

“With Salesforce, we can make business decisions based on clear facts and quickly adapt to customer, market, or business needs,” said Forde. “This agility is essential for keeping us innovative, competitive, and responsive.”

 
 

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