Case Study Preview: How a Global Direct Selling Wellness Company Digitized Workforce Performance and Onboarding

At Rallyware, we recently published a case study on a direct selling wellness company that digitized workforce performance, onboarding, and enablement. You can download it here, but below, find some highlights on how implementing digital transformation on a global scale helped this multinational country secure higher results. 

What Is a Direct Selling Company?

Just for clarification to those who are new to the direct selling industry: direct selling is an industry that empowers representatives, consultants, and distributors to market and sell a company’s goods to customers. Sometimes, as in this case, those goods are beauty products – makeup and other skincare products. 

Direct selling, or direct sales as it is sometimes known, involves people-to-people relationship building, and even recorded or live product demonstrations. It’s a great option for folks who wish to earn money on a self-determined basis – and an industry that showed a lot of potential for growth and innovation in 2021. Many direct selling companies are seeking software for direct sales, so they can be fully competitive into the 2020s.

How Can Technology Help Direct Selling Distributors?

Technology can help direct selling distributors in several ways, such as:

1. Performance Enablement Platforms: Technology can help distributors perform better at scale. By using digital Performance Enablement Platforms, distributors can expand their customer reach and generate more sales.
2. Mobile Apps: Mobile apps can provide distributors with on-the-go access to sales tools and resources. For example, distributors can use mobile apps to access customer information, track sales activities, and communicate with customers.
3. Social Media: Technology can help distributors leverage social media platforms to promote their products, create targeted ads, and reach out to potential customers.
4. Training and Education: Direct selling companies can use technology to provide distributors with ongoing training and education, in addition to onboarding. This can be done through online courses, webinars, and other forms of e-learning. Digital platforms can help them access those learnings instantly.
5. Inventory Management: Technology can help distributors manage their inventory more efficiently. By using inventory management software, they can track stock levels, monitor product performance, and make informed decisions about purchasing and restocking.
6. Payment Processing: Technology can help distributors process payments more efficiently and securely. By using online payment platforms like Venmo, they can accept payments from customers all over the world and reduce the risk of fraud.

Overall, technology can help direct selling distributors improve their operations, increase efficiency, and provide better service to their customers. Now let’s dive into this specific case.

Who Is This Global Direct Selling Wellness Company?

This worldwide beauty and wellness company is laser focused on developing and delivering innovative products to the market. A leader in beauty and wellness products, this company maintains a wide portfolio of brand types, including a nutritional brand, a personal care brand, and more. The company’s representatives distribute its products on a global scale, encompassing 60,000+ brand affiliates in approximately 50 markets.

What Were the Challenges for This Company?  

Two main challenges confronted this global wellness direct selling company: 

• Scale and Onboarding: With a massive and constantly expanding global footprint, this company needed a way to unite its worldwide affiliates under the same general umbrella. This company had and has a huge variety of products and product lines, and they needed to make sure that no matter the country or language a new or existing affiliate belonged to, they would have the same quality training as in any other geographical locality. They would be able to become product masters, no matter what. This seemed to them something technology could help with.
• Resource Access: More specifically, affiliates needed to have access to the right resources – training- and compliance-related – very quickly. The company needed a central repository of all resources and an easy way for their affiliates to access these educational and regulatory materials. 

The company knew that if they could address these core challenges, they would likely improve onboarding, training, engagement, and retention – some of their core KPIs for their workforce. Being onboarded as a new affiliate can be overwhelming, because there’s simply so much to absorb. There are compliance policies. There are product specifics and brand knowledge. There are the sales methods for direct selling. The results can be overwhelming.

More precisely, at the beginning, there are so many “how” questions at play: how can the affiliate meet her goals? How does she set up an online store? How can she stay compliant? How can she communicate with uplines? It was crucial that affiliates be able to answer these questions easily. This would reduce the overwhelming nature of the training process and result in higher KPIs for workforce success. It would also improve long-term retention.

The question was which software for direct sales would allow them to fully address these obstacles, head-on. For this, they turned to Rallyware, the Performance Enablement Platform for organizations with large, distributed sales forces.

The Rallyware Results

Rallyware helped this global wellness direct selling company centralize their educational, onboarding, and learning resources and materials in a single digital location. This helped with the problem of resource access at the same time that it gave their global affiliate workforce a far easier onboarding experience. 

“Some of the unexpected benefits [of Rallyware] that we didn’t initially consider included using the tool as a means of gathering data to get to know our customers better, to process certifications or qualifications for advancement, and as a means to provide and meet regulatory compliance training.” – Program Manager, Distributor Success

Once folks had signed up as brand affiliates, Rallyware made it easy for them to participate in the company’s multiple programs. Rallyware allowed them to define their goals and objectives as entrepreneurs and then showed them the most useful (learning, training, etc.) activity for them to complete at the moment it would be most useful in meeting those goals and objectives.

As a result, the company has been able to implement rapid digital transformation. In 2020, markets in Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America joined the company’s workforce. In terms of new affiliates, the company experienced a year-over-year growth of 3.5x in recruitment and onboarding. 

On the micro level, these direct selling affiliates had a far easier time with onboarding and training. Task completion rates soared; onboarding times shortened. Brand affiliate engagement and activity metrics increased considerably, leading to more sales and higher engagement. 

What Lesson Should Direct Selling Companies Take Here?

To see the specifics of how Rallyware helped this global wellness company digitize onboarding and enablement – including the data and numbers – download the complete free case study here. After you’ve read it, schedule your demo to see the complete digital experience for workforce performance in action.