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The North American Global Food unit of the J.R. Simplot Company is dedicated to providing high-quality foodservice products. They partner with a range of clients, from large restaurant chains to smaller businesses, schools, and more.
Sercante played a pivotal role in helping Simplot Global Food to streamline its processes and enhance its customer engagement while working across five divisions to build consumer, business-to-business, regional, and global marketing strategies. Together, the teams bridged the gaps between its sales, customer service, and marketing divisions and opened a world of actionable data insights.
The Simplot Global Food team recognized the changing landscape of buyer expectations. Consumers were increasingly accustomed to a seamless, personalized, and connected experience in this new world.
The challenge was to align their sales, service, and marketing efforts to meet these expectations, ensuring a digital-first approach.
The company had traditionally operated in a market where personal relationships and offline interactions played a significant role. However, the emergence of digital channels and changing consumer behavior brought forth a challenge: adapting to the evolving expectations of B2B and B2C buyers.
The complexity of the buyer journeys posed a significant challenge. For example, prospective clients on the B2B side engaged with the Simplot Global Food marketing and sales teams through various touchpoints, including food shows, digital advertising, and partner channels. However, these interactions could be disjointed, leading to a fractured customer journey.
The challenge was to create cohesion throughout customer experiences so each touchpoint contributed to a consistent brand image.
The Simplot Global Food team faced difficulties in gauging the effectiveness of its marketing efforts. The legwork of collecting and synthesizing metrics hindered the team’s ability to make data-driven decisions, optimize campaigns, and demonstrate a tangible return on investment (ROI) for its marketing endeavors.
“We were spending a lot of time manually inputting analytics from various platforms into a report to analyze and inform our marketing decisions. This manual entry was taking away valuable time as we were working on data inputting vs. data analyzing. We were looking to solve this for more efficient and effective reporting.” – Savannah Paramo, Simplot Global Food
The lack of real-time monitoring and comprehensive reporting made it challenging to measure the impact of marketing campaigns on the sales funnel.
In the highly competitive foodservice industry, personalized engagement is paramount. The Simplot Western Stockman business unit’s marketing team understood that a one-size-fits-all approach was no longer effective. The challenge was to deliver tailored and personalized content to different audience segments at the correct stages in their buying journey, particularly in the animal health and feed industry clients that the business unit serves.
“One of the frustrations we had before was not having the best way to collect accurate information about how our customers were interacting with our assets.” – Melissa Gautschi, Simplot Western Stockmen’s
Achieving this level of personalization required a sophisticated marketing automation solution that could adapt to the diverse needs of their clientele.
A common challenge faced by many organizations is the misalignment between sales, service, and marketing teams. Lack of sales and marketing coordination can lead to missed opportunities and unnecessary friction during sales engagements and service conversations.
Bridging these gaps and fostering collaboration across the essential departments was identified as a critical requirement for overall business success. The partnership with Sercante aimed to overcome these hurdles through a combination of innovative technologies and tailored strategies.
“Sercante works so closely with us that I feel they are an extension of our team. They know our system, our efforts, and our road bumps, and they're available to step in and consult us through challenges along the way. The team is very communicative, supportive, organized, and encouraging.“
The first step in finding a winning solution was to fully understand the buyer journey. The teams recognized the shift in buyer behavior towards digital interactions and acknowledged the need for a personalized, connected, and consistent experience. From there, we created an overall strategy with an Account Engagement implementation, which is a marketing automation platform that runs on Salesforce, as the first tactical step.
“Sercante helps provide us with the tools to accomplish marketing plans, tactics, and more with a learning approach that we can carry forward on our own. They show us the how and expect us to do our part to take that learning and apply it moving forward.” – Savannah Paramo, Simplot Global Food
After getting Account Engagement up and running, the team started utilizing many of the benefits of marketing automation and sales and service integration.
In the words of Savannah Paramo, “Implementing Account Engagement was a game-changer. It allowed us to capture leads seamlessly and streamline our processes.”
Implementing Marketing Cloud Intelligence (formerly Datorama) gives Simplot a comprehensive view of its marketing and sales efforts.
Intelligence pulls data from multiple sources for Simplot including:
Then it harmonizes the data and presents it on easy-to-read dashboards so the marketing team can continuously monitor and act fast to make the most of their marketing campaign efforts.
“The speed, organization, and precision that Sercante has had in helping us implement Marketing Intelligence Cloud has been a big ‘wow’ to me. Every week they are prepared to push the project forward while meeting our needs and expectations, making sure our data is flowing through accurately, and providing us with the training necessary to empower our use of the platform.” – Savannah Paramo, Simplot Global Food
Knowing their B2B audience wants a more B2C-esque experience, the marketing teams focused on strategy by creating personalized nurture email campaigns based on known data points. They also tailored content and touchpoints for specific audience segments, such as K12 schools or regional stores, through HTML and dynamic content.
“We implemented a Welcome Email Series for all new leads coming into our system that introduces them to our resources, allows them to opt in or out, and helps show us the data behind warm and cold leads. This protects us and our audience from unnecessary or unwanted emails and also gives us an engaged audience for our newsletter content. It brings value to both our audience and to us.” – Savannah Paramo, Simplot Global Food
Using the opportunity contact role in Salesforce enables effective campaign influence tracking. In addition, establishing dashboards allows the marketing teams to track visitor engagement, opportunities influenced, and campaign success. Simplot also uses Salesforce reporting to measure the ROI of campaigns and understand their impact on the sales funnel.
Simplot’s engagement with Sercante and the strategic implementation of Salesforce solutions brought transformative outcomes across multiple divisions at the company. The team witnessed an evolution from fragmented touchpoints to a unified customer journey, overcoming challenges posed by evolving buyer expectations, limited visibility into marketing impact, and the need for personalized engagement.
Aligning marketing, sales, and service departments ensures meaningful coordination between touchpoints, delivering cohesive and consistent messaging at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
“By taking a centralized approach across our diverse business units, we have been able to share ideas, maintain brand consistency, and mature team members faster.” – Amy Clark, Simplot IT – Digital Delivery
The integration of advanced tracking codes and completion actions provided Simplot with real-time monitoring and comprehensive reporting. This enhanced visibility enabled the marketing team to measure the success of campaigns, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions to optimize their go-to-market strategy continually.
As Savannah Paramo said, “Real-time monitoring empowered us to measure success, identify trends, and optimize our marketing strategy continually.”
The implementation of personalized nurture programs enabled The J.R. Simplot Company to tailor content to specific global audience segments. The result was increased engagement, with operators receiving relevant information, recipes, and insights tailored to their needs and preferences.
According to Savannah Paramo, “Our clients get relevant information, recipes, and insights tailored to their specific needs and preferences.”
The team also looked closely at how they were prompting their audiences to take action and tweaking their strategies to speak directly to the right audiences. Tailoring their CTAs led to an 80% click-through-rate increase for email campaigns
“Click-through rates (CTRs) for one of our business units have increased from around 5% to 9% by creating clear calls to action (CTAs) on our electronic direct mail (EDM) campaigns.” – Amy Clark, Simplot IT – Digital Delivery
The comprehensive approach resulted in a measurable return on investment. As Savannah Paramo expressed, “Measuring ROI became tangible. We could connect marketing and sales efforts to pipeline and closed deals.”
The J.R. Simplot Company can now track opportunities influenced by volume, measure campaign success, and connect marketing and sales efforts to pipeline and closed deals. The Marketing Cloud Intelligence dashboards provide a holistic view of campaign effectiveness, allowing for continuous optimization and strategic planning.
CTR increase for business unit's email campaigns
Real-time ROI reporting
CTR increase for business unit's email campaigns