Our sales team here at Samsonite is super lean — so as you can probably imagine, our salespeople don’t have time to fill out spreadsheets manually.
Watch Meghan O’Keefe, wholesale digital marketing manager at Samsonite, share her ecommerce strategies for driving efficiency with Salsify.
But this was the kind of work they had to do: fill out individual spreadsheets for each digital customer, resize images, and other time-consuming administrative tasks. This work was a significant drain on time and resources, and I knew there had to be a better way.
My name’s Meghan O’Keefe, and I’m the wholesale digital marketing manager for Samsonite. When we adopted Salsify, it made a huge difference as a sales enablement tool. Before getting Salsify, I would also spend a lot of time filling out seemingly endless spreadsheets.
We started with Salsify by using templates and exports and then later integrated it with our enterprise resource planning (ERP) system so we could scale. Today, Salsify is not only our single source of truth but our system of record for product data.
Our speed to market is much faster. We’re able to get more products live in a consistent way for our brands across all our channels with a fraction of the effort — and that’s far from the only benefit we’ve seen.
Getting Live Product Content in a Matter of Minutes
"[Salsify] allows us to do everything a lot more efficiently … It's instantaneous to, for instance, publish enhanced content in 15 minutes, which is incredible."
— Meghan O'Keefe, Wholesale Digital Marketing Manager, Samsonite
We can handle pretty much anything faster now, but enhanced content is a good example. Before, there was a lot of back and forth when it came to getting enhanced content live. With traditional providers, sometimes the approvals process and the red tape could mean it took weeks to get things to market.
Now, we can get pages set up for enhanced content quickly and, in many cases, send them out to our retailers through a direct connection.
The other day, I saw that one of our products was live on Target, but the enhanced content wasn’t. I already had the enhanced content page built out, so I hit publish, and 15 minutes later, the content was live.
It’s incredible. It allows us to really have a compelling go-to-market strategy (GTM) for every one of our product launches.
This process has eliminated a lot of the workload for our creative team too. With one click of a button, we can get a totally customized sell sheet with images, dimensions, product copy, and everything else. Our creative team can spend their time focusing on other things.
Boosting Better Customer Support
One of the things I’m proudest of is how Salsify has helped us serve our customers better. We have a customer service team in Jacksonville, FL, dedicated to answering customer phone calls and emails. But these people often haven’t seen our products in person.
So they would get questions like, “Will this fit in the overhead bin?” or “Is there a handle on the bottom?” And to answer, they would have to email product marketing and wait for product marketing to get back to them.
We’ve gotten rid of this whole step by creating a view in Salsify just for our customer service team. Now, customer service reps can log in to Salsify, see what they need to see, and give the customers an instantaneous answer.
This approach is much easier, and I think it probably adds to our conversion rates too. Creating this view was one of the best things we did this year.
Ecommerce Strategy: Looking At the Big Picture
If I were to advise someone starting on this journey, I’d say to try to envision the bigger picture of how Salsify will be used before you implement it. This is something I wish I had done when we started because I think it would have helped us set up things in a way that’s simpler and more user-friendly.
I would also caution against scaling too fast. Instead, get lots of practice with your user group first, and get feedback from them too.
Regarding how you leverage Salsify, I think it’s important to use Salsify’s insights to identify the places where you’re not currently succeeding. Everyone wants to focus on where the wins are and what you’re doing well. But I think it’s really valuable to have insight into where you can improve.
For example, it may be that if you run the search report, you’ll realize that you’re losing to a lot of competition or that you haven’t thought about using a key search term. I think identifying those gaps is really valuable so that you know where to grow.
Moving Ahead With Continued Success
Salsify allows us to do everything a lot more efficiently — from going to market with our content to serving customers. And on top of this, Salsify has also helped us centralize content and data so that we’re talking about everything in a consistent way across all channels.
There’s still room for us to grow too. We’re now re-imagining how we’re going to manage Salsify going forward, and I am looking into using Salsify Workflow, especially for our creative team.
On top of all its other benefits, everybody likes using Salsify. I haven’t heard anybody saying that they don’t know how to do something or that it’s not user-friendly. Everyday users find Salsify super helpful, and I think that’s another reason why it’s been so successful in our organization.
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