Success Story: Tapping Tech to Drive Agility & Grow Sales During COVID-19

Tim Denman: Welcome, everyone to “Case Study: How Calavo and Foodstuffs Modernized their Value Chain” webinar, which is hosted by RIS News and CGT and in collaboration with Salesforce. I'm Tim Denman, editor In chief of CGT and RIS, and I thank you for joining us today.

With me today to discuss how Calavo and Foodstuffs accelerated growth by modernizing their value chains during COVID-19, while much of the industry was still struggling to steady their sales and in-field execution, are Michael Carr and Molly Mecham, from Salesforce. Molly, and Michael, thank you for joining us today. So let's jump in, into the conversation. Michael, why don't you just kick us off?

Michael Carr: Thanks very much, Tim. I'm part of the Industry Go to Market team at Salesforce, and I've spent a lot of my time speaking to customers about how they can transform their businesses and many of the challenges that they are facing around the modern distribution at this time.

But before we get going, I just wanted to mention that Salesforce is a publicly traded company and customers should base their purchasing decisions on products and services that are currently available. And I wanted to thank you because we understand that it's been a tough time for many businesses right now. And we really thank you for your time that you've taken to spend with us today. Your success is a priority for us, and we're committed to be your partner in persevering together in all the days and years ahead.

So as you've seen, B2B in consumer goods is changing rapidly. And while our world has been rocked in the past six months, as we talked to experts and our customers, despite all of these challenges that have come from COVID, there is also come up some opportunities in the markets as well.

For example, when we look at disruptive selling, there's this reduced face-to-face time, and a lot of the work that has been done in that industry is built on face-to-face time between the field-sales or the key account managers and the buyers or store managers. And this all being disrupted, as well as having to teach up our salesforce to sell from anywhere, without being able to physically go into stores or to meet the buyers anymore.

As well as we see the challenge in field execution, where we have had limited rep availability due to the impacts of COVID or from stopping furloughs. And we've had to make do with less people to get the same work done under much more challenging circumstances because there are increased general limitations where there are less people in the stores from the store employee's perspective.

There are more regulations that have to be complied by with our field team to ensure everybody's safety in the stores and make sure that all employees are being kept safe during this pandemic.

And, finally, is this idea of this Channel Proliferation that's been happening. Stores have this need to have these always-on digital storefronts that enable them to buy from us at any time, making sure that they have the right products available at the right price. And that, if anything, as this B2B experience needs to be in the same shape or fashion as we've come to expect as consumers to be similar to our B2B buying experience. And also using that information from buying to make sure that we offer personalized buying information available to those people, buying to these digital storefronts.

So what we have seen is that consumer goods set up for traditional retailers are often disconnected. The brands have been set up to optimize what's going on in the store and even pre-COVID, 52% of plans are not executed in store as planned. And this led to up to $104 billion not being effectively utilized. And this is largely due to this disconnect between what the consumer goods brand owner was planning and what was happening at the given retailer.

And this obviously caused the problem of what the brand was planning for the experience of the consumer, not being delivered in the store as it was planned. And in many cases, point solutions addressed this problem. But what has happened now with the impact of COVID and the pandemic is that the ability to be more agile when this disconnected silos of information that aren't shared between what's happening in the field, what's happening with key account management, and also what's being shared with these B2B storefronts.

With all of that not being on a single platform, information is lost or siloed along the way, and it makes it very difficult to be able to adjust in time with all of the changes and challenges that you are facing.

And this is where Salesforce sees ourselves playing, is in this need to modernize across B2B. So it's enabling the seamless, it doesn't matter where you plan or for what channel, but the integrated planning, selling and execution is coordinated on a single platform across all stakeholders.

And it doesn't matter what sales channel you're working with, whether it's the large retailers or field execution to get through the perfect store, whether you're dealing with the longtime mom-and-pop stores, trying to run the business from the mobile phone, through a B2B commerce website and being able to be aware of the latest and greatest in terms of your product offering and making sure the right products and promotions are being represented along with the planograms in store.

But it also opens up the food service and professional channels as well. If at any time that you have a field Salesforce employee go out to, whether it be a large retailer, mom-and-pop store, or to a food service, like hotels, restaurants, cafes, schools, it could also be professional businesses like doctors and dentists and veterinarians. Anytime when you have someone from your team that needs to call on or service their customer, either digitally or face-to-face, that's where Salesforce is trying to provide this integrated and modernized route to market.

So what we have is our solution, which is the integrated route to market, which creates a seamless B2B experience for consumer goods companies when it comes to CRM. And it's not only about the managing key accounts, optimizing the field execution and the transforming the B2B commerce in care. It's the fact that they all happen on a single platform, whether there's marketing inputs that need to be provided, whether there's service inputs that need to be provided, and any inputs that need to be collaborated upon, they can be in this comprehensive, collaborative platform. So the platform, whether you're managing key accounts, optimizing the field execution, or working with the B2B long-tail customer, it allows you to collaborate in the platform so you can bring the teams together.

So if you're a key account manager and you're trying to deal with any problems that have occurred in the field, and you need to coordinate across your supply chain or your field sales team, you can do that through the Key Account Management Tool that's on Salesforce. The goal of it is to bring any problems or any issues that need to be, or any deviations from plan, to the attention of the key account manager, allow them to act on those insights and bring the teams together through the comprehensive collaboration to solve those problems.

And it's very much the same thing when it comes into optimizing field execution. But there the focuses are more about focusing on route planning, make sure the routes are optimized, that you're calling on the right stores, where you can maximize your revenue, and making sure that you're executing the right tasks in those store. Anything able to grow your business through mobile order capture or setting in promotions or checking on promotional compliance in the field.

But it's by the same token for those smaller customers where you cannot provide the full-field sales team or traditional face-to-face service. There's this ability to transform B2B commerce and customer service, to make sure that a smaller mom-and-pop store has visibility on the right products, any promotions that they could or should be running, and making sure that their digital store is up and running with minimal efforts and work of the full dedication of a field sales team, but to be able to make this so the long-tail customers can execute their business on the platform.

And as I said, the collaboration is built-in across all teams, to allow them to solve problems and bring together teams to work on particular issues that have come up, and also to inform other parties in marketing or brand management, to make sure that they're aware of what's going on with the brand.

So, the next thing to say is that this is all on the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform. If you see there, the industry is built on the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform, which puts the customer at the center of this. And what we have with that tool, is this ability to have responsive time to value. And with the customer being at the center and the industry-specific developments happening for the consumer goods vertical all on the same platform, the team is able to take advantage of the tools in the platform, like AI and Vision, to make sure that if you're in the app, you can take advantage of those tools.

And with that, we also have the fact that the tool is agile, and we have had customers who have been using Consumer Goods Cloud retail executional, field execution content, being able to go live in two weeks. And with our B2B Commerce accelerators, customers will be able to go live now in weeks, not months.

So with all that as the preamble around where Salesforce fits in, and the problems and the opportunities that have come up, I'll actually hand you over to my colleague, Molly, to take you through some of the customer stories that are related to where customers are innovating on the integrated route to market.

Molly Mecham: Thanks, Michael. I wanted to hit on Calavo Growers as the team had said and what they're doing in kind of a response to COVID and how they are modernizing their route to market. So Calavo is an international company specializing in avocado. They were founded in the 1920s. So about 80 years old, have a team of about 500 people, and are based in California.

As COVID hit, getting their products to their channel partners for consumers to enjoy was really critical and pretty challenging. They wanted to make sure they were there for their customers and their consumers, and that they were empowering their team members with the right tools to really maximize those sales opportunities, but also minimize waste.

And historically they had tracked all of their work and opportunities on spreadsheets. This challenge was pretty robust in that their broader teams, sales and finance, did not have the visibility to the different opportunities that were coming down the pipe. Without knowing those opportunities, then the teams couldn't figure out the right amount of inventory that needed to be picked or shipped or where to send it. And they were really struggling with some waste. It was also getting even more difficult to hold the sales teams accountable as everybody shifted to remote work with COVID. And, again, that visibility and the lack thereof was really just compounded.

So as Calavo really started on their journey on transforming how they worked, we partnered with them and we landed on the Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud for their small, but mighty team. And the way we worked with them is, they really leveraged the Salesforce solution in that single platform to consolidate all of their account information and all of their opportunities, which then provided that visibility to everyone on the team. So this helped not only drive that productivity across teams and collaboration, but also helped reduce waste and really access that overall reporting, again, in that single platform, single pane, single view to drive that overall collaboration and productivity.

Additionally, as some of the team members were starting to get back in the field and having a few different visits, everything was available on mobile devices. So all of the team members could pull up the relevant information. They could plan their daily schedules within the mobile app. They could set up tasks and they could make sure all email communications were in kind of that single view and have that one platform to really showcase all of the work, together. So really excited to continue to partner with these guys and see where they go next.

And the second story we really wanted to hit on today is Foodstuff, which is also a company that has been around for over 80 years. It's a co-op that was formed in New Zealand by some grocers to really drive customer and consumer experience here. So they are today, New Zealand's biggest grocery distributor. They have over 350 stores, and they employ more than 30,000 people. They are supplying, I think, over 700 stores with many different products across different categories. So a pretty complex business. And they're doing all of this as their customers are getting more and more sophisticated online and how they want to transact.

So previously they had a pretty old legacy platform for their commerce solution. It was pretty unstable. They were having issues with data, correctness and integration, and the user experience was just not that good. There was a lot of text; there were very few images. And as we started working with Foodstuff, we really wanted to help them fix what was broken, but also set that stage for the future. So we helped get them on a stable platform, really driving that integration. So they have over 14 different integration points with SAP. They are able to use kind of this first cross-functional platform to help drive their agility and their relevance with their customers.

They created a better user experience, and they've really seen the results in just these last three months, which are pretty incredible. So they've seen 65,000 online orders, an increase in sales. They've also seen people move through the site and check out faster because it is a better experience. So people are able to find what they want and move through the experience quicker.

As they are continuing to evolve the experience, we've seen a large increase in new users. And as they move into phase two, we're working with Foodstuff to bring in live chat among other capabilities to really help drive that overall community. They're looking into some self-help support, some knowledge and additional merchandising content, again, to really drive that overall experience forward and continue to create those relevant experiences for their customers.

So just a couple of stories, bringing to life, kind of what Michael hit on, on the needs in the marketplace and how we at Salesforce are partnering with our different customers. I'll turn it back over to the team.

Denman: Thanks, Molly and Michael, that was great. We do have a few minutes left that we can field some questions from the audience. The first one here is wondering if there's any specific types of consumer goods companies — and I know we've mentioned two at the end there — but is there any other specific types of consumer goods companies that these tools are especially useful for?

Carr:  I think any problem that you have a field rep that is executing in the field for you, whether it be in the food service channel or the traditional retail channel, or even in the professional channels like going to doctors, veterinarians or a dentist, for example, and it doesn't necessarily matter if you're selling in a product at the time, or if you're just sharing the brand experience with the customer, making sure they're up-to-date with the latest. In any of those sales channels, this product is applicable because it’s organizing the field team to be able to execute for the most optimal way to push your brand experience at them.

Denman: Obviously there's a big intelligence engine running behind all of the solution sets. What kind of AI is built into the offering?

Carr:  So a big part of what we offer is the consumer goods data model, and the interesting thing about it is that it runs that for store level. So we can gather the data of what stores you've visited, and we can also gather the data on what products we've sold into their stores, as well as sales being sold out of their stores. And with that vast volume of data, it enables us to use Vision for planogram detection to make sure that the right products are in the shelf in the right way based on a machine learning model to detect the right planogram.

So using the data available in a data model at a store level, whether it's sales, visits, whatever parameters that would be stored, we're able to effectively use that information with machine learning and artificial intelligence together deliver good optimization.