Shaklee
Elevating a Distribution Business with a Powerful Back Office Tool
Shaklee is a leading provider of natural nutrition, personal care, beauty, and home cleaning products. Founded by nutritional pioneer Dr. Forrest C. Shaklee, the company’s approach is personal, creating a unique health profile, or Healthprint™, for each customer and recommending products accordingly. Shaklee operates on a direct sales model, with a network of independent distributors growing the business through referrals.
Shaklee has more than 750,000 distributors in the United States, Canada, Japan, China, Malaysia, Mexico and Taiwan.
The Challenge
Shaklee wanted to provide its distributors with a modern, intuitive Direct Back Office to help them manage and grow their businesses. The company’s legacy DBO systems presented a number of important challenges:
Scalability & Maintenance
The existing systems were built piece-meal as Shaklee’s needs evolved. The result was a patchwork of old and new systems that were not perfectly integrated and were difficult to upgrade or expand, owing to compatibility issues with the various tools. In addition, users had to be trained on multiple systems, which took considerable time and resources.
Consolidated Reporting
Shaklee’s business model requires visibility into a whole range of metrics, including bonuses, points and incentives, the number of Healthprint™ reports sent, and number of events hosted/attended.
The reporting capabilities of the old platform were limited, so different metrics were stored in different systems, and there was no single place to get complete overview of a distributor’s business.
In order to equip distributors to do their best work, Shaklee’s systems would need to compress and filter many thousands of rows of data into a dashboard view that distributors could quickly access on their phones - all while keeping reports up-to-date with geo-specific data and maintaining and monitoring a complex network of relationships. The legacy system lacked this visibility and agility.
The Solution
Groundswell helped develop a back office tool tailored to Shaklee’s distributors’ needs using a mix of native Salesforce.com features, custom Lightning components, and 3rd party system integrations. This modular solution is a highly customized toolkit with everything a Shaklee distributor needs for strategic, efficient growth.
360 Dashboard
- Success Bonus Tracking - visual of where a distributor is in his/her own success cycle to earn bonuses tied to various sales and networking activities
- Rank Advancement
- Incentive Tracker - keeps incentives front-of-mind and is one of the first things distributors see upon logging in
- Business-at-a-Glance - quick view of all key metrics and sales volumes and ability to drill down for further analysis
Contact Management Tools
- Lead Management and Nurturing - capture valuable information on leads and manage activities, taking them through the entire sales cycle
- Client Management - store key client information and build customer profiles to nurture relationships; track all correspondences and client-related activities
- Team Management - allows Distributors to monitor key performance indicators for all the members of their upline and downline and provides a channel to guide and motivate them accordingly
Email Marketing and Communications
- Tailored Communications - ability to segment lists so users can send personalized messaging to Leads and Clients alike and increase response rates
- Pre-built templates - pre-designed professional templates for quick and easy customization and sending
- Campaigns - group and assign contacts to respective campaigns and track which campaigns worked best
Event Management System and Customized Calendar
- Organize and schedule events with ease - set up various types of events to connect with leads and existing clients alike
- Send Invites - pre-designed templates for sending interactive event invitations to leads and clients, incorporated within each distributor’s personal calendars
- Track responses - Monitor RSVPs and provide ease of following up to invitees who have not yet responded
- Monitor event-related KPIs - number of events hosted and attended as part of distributor KPIs integrated with built-in reporting tool
The Outcome
Shaklee Connect has now been rolled out throughout the U.S. and Canada, with over 17,000 users and continues to grow. Shaklee’s Distributors are now able to take advantage of a robust, cloud-based back-office platform which not only provides them with tools to help them achieve their goals but also offers deep visibility and insights into all their individual businesses. It’s a future-proof platform which can be easily scaled up to the company’s entire global distributor network.
Read the official Shaklee press release here.
VP-Global Front Office, Shaklee
If you're looking for a partner who will be in it with you, who will feel like part of your team and who's willing to go the extra distance, then Groundswell is a great partner for you.