Customer case
How meal-kit delivery service giant HelloFresh uses face-to-face marketing to maintain its competitive edge
This is
HelloFresh face-to-face marketing: Few innovations have been as successful as the food delivery box revolution that has taken place over the past ten years. Among the larger winners is HelloFresh. Originally launched in Germany, the company now secures a solid spot in the global market. In an era where digital seems to be our primary means of communication, the personal touch of face-to-face sales remains a vital aspect for HelloFresh.
Challenge
Digitizing the face-to-face channel and making sure it maintains an effective and scalable way of selling HelloFresh products.
Solution
Transforming the channel from paper to digital, while bridging the gap between HelloFresh, its customers and field sales agencies by creating a continuous feedback loop.
“Briggs+Walker helps our face-to-face channel by making it easy to reach more people, making our interactions more personal and ensuring our data is safe“
Field Marketing Manager – HelloFresh
Building relationships for long term success
Louk Rodríguez López has witnessed the remarkable growth of HelloFresh firsthand during his seven years of employment at the company. Now responsible for Field Marketing activities in the BeNeLux, Louk directly contributes to maintaining the commercial edge of the company. We discuss his role, the transformation that Field Marketing has gone through during his tenure, and how building strong relationships with sales agencies and continuously refining sales strategies through technological advancements lead to long term success.
“Briggs+Walker software ensures that the brand does not over-engage in any particular location, avoiding the risk of saturating a market. As we manage multiple sales agencies simultaneously, knowing their exact whereabouts is crucial for our long-term planning and effectiveness.”
How digitization professionalized field sales
If you’re a seasoned field sales expert like most of us at Briggs+Walker, you might remember the old days of paper forms and canvas mapping. You might remember the many types of human errors that were a given at the time. Still, you might not realize how digitizing field sales has had broader positive impacts than just the decrease in spelling mistakes.
Louk, who started in his current role after this transition, shares his struggle to imagine the logistical efforts and inefficiencies that used to be common to our kind: “I heard that university students were hired just to fill in data points all day,” he says, frowning.
Louk is one step ahead of this, and leverages all the opportunities of a digitized sales process to his advantage. He uses data to create quick feedback loops between new customers, sales reps and the brand. And he maximizes sales rep conversion opportunities with expert canvassing techniques.
Creating continuous feedback loops to optimize conversions and improve customer happiness
HelloFresh’s mission is to change the way people eat forever. Louk emphasizes the importance of establishing a personal connection between the brand, sales agents, and new customers. “This mission is quite broad and entails many things. But one of the core tasks we try to achieve is de-stressing people during dinner time”.
Briggs+Walker connects insights from new customers and sales reps, so that each sale can be reverse-engineered. Meaning that whenever a newly onboarded customer poses a question that might be an opportunity for an improvement in HelloFresh’s sales pitch, Louk and his team can directly get in touch with the responsible sales agent to learn more about the specific interaction (s)he had with that client. They can then improve their pitch online and feed it to all sales agents without delay.
“The benefits are twofold,” says Louk. “We can assure our customer that this question will be picked up by all our sales agents right away. And we help our sales agents to build a smoother storyline every day!”
It’s a surprisingly personal acquisition approach for an E-commerce business.
Addressing Area Management
A vital learning for HelloFresh face-to-face marketing back in the age of pen and paper administration, was the risk associated with canvassing fatigue. Following a sales surge in the Netherlands in the early days of the company, shift conversions began to decline. This forced HelloFresh to expand its horizons to neighboring countries to sustain their growth rate.
With Briggs+Walker, Louk can track the canvassing areas of multiple agencies in real-time, allowing him to track the progress of field reps.
“Briggs+Walker software ensures that the brand does not over-engage in any particular location, avoiding the risk of saturating a market. As we manage multiple sales agencies simultaneously, knowing their exact whereabouts is crucial for our long-term planning and effectiveness.”
Needless to say, this is a big leap forward from sales reps highlighting the streets that they covered on a physical map. By digitising this proces, canvassing fatigue is no longer an issue for HelloFresh!
Finding the best next canvassing area
By implementing third-party data within Briggs+Walker, Louk and his team predict the future canvassing areas with the highest conversion probability.
“For example, we can see for specific postal codes which type of crisps people like and the likelihood of people running in a specific postal code area,” says Louk. “We use this data to adjust our communication and increase our shift conversion.”
Conclusion
When it comes to marketing, people often think of Meta advertisements and online funnels. However, as effective as these digital strategies may be for some, HelloFresh demonstrates that the human touch in sales continues to thrive in a digital world.
