Having a strong go-to-market (GTM) strategy is vital for brands. They need to have a plan to engage with customers, gain a competitive advantage and ultimately sell their products.
ENDVR is a platform that helps brands increase in-store sell-through and customer acquisition. It has now become an integral part of many brands’ GTM strategy for proactively integrating sales contests in their initiatives, teaching sales associates about the technical details of their products and managing visual merchandising checks, all this in a digital and scalable way.
Mountain Hardwear has been using ENDVR for 3 years now. Here is how and why they have included ENDVR in their yearly GTM strategy.
Before ENDVR
We had a discussion with Kelly Caccamo, former Marketing Manager at Mountain Hardwear Canada. Her and her team’s objective was to find strategies to boost in-store sales.
Before using ENDVR, Mountain Hardwear was doing what a lot of brands do. Reps would go door to door each season to engage with sales associates and teach them about their products. “With the number of doors versus the amount of reps, it was really just impossible to get in front of every sales associate,” Kelly said.
Regarding sales contests, this is what Kelly had to say:
“Prior to using ENDVR, a rep would reach out to me if they wanted to organize a sales contest, and I would almost dread it, because it was never as simple as you wanted it to be. After figuring out the details and the prize, you’d create a poster to promote the contest and just hope that the rep does a good job explaining it to the store and then that the store actually keeps track of printing the receipts. It was always kind of a mess. When the contest ended, you never really had any idea if it went well or not, or if it helped to increase sales.”
Mountain Hardwear would also invest in visual in-store point of purchase (POP) material. Again, they would have no way to know how the POP display looked, or even if they were put up by store employees – unless they checked in with each individual store.
In summary, Mountain Hardwear’s biggest pain points were:
- Hard to teach sales associates about their products and technologies.
- Very complicated to organize and manage sales contests.
- No visibility or measurability on sales contests results.
- No visibility on POP display (don’t even know if they were put up).
- Hard to reach, engage and build relationships with sales associates in general.
The Impact of ENDVR at Mountain Hardwear
Kelly and her team started using ENDVR for its learning modules. Pretty quickly after that, they started launching sales contests through ENDVR. Later, they started doing visual merchandising checks with ENDVR.
Let’s explore the impact that each of these initiatives on ENDVR had on Mountain Hardwear.
Learning Modules
ENDVR’s learning modules helped solve many of Kelly and the marketing team’s pain points. First of all, they moved away from the “old school” cards with discount codes and SWAG they gave to sales associates. All this was replaced by bitesize frequent learning campaigns on ENDVR, rewarding sales associates upon completion with cash, discounts, free products or prizes. Reps still go door to door to build relationships with managers and sales staff, but their visits and ENDVR’s campaigns are very complementary.
When they first started using ENDVR, Kelly says that what was the most surprising was the engagement from sales associates. “I remember being quite shocked at the engagement right off the bat. I thought it would start slow and it really didn’t. We were very pleased with that.”
Sales Contests
Sales contests of the past were really troublesome. They were offline, slow and super complicated to organize, execute and manage. This led Mountain Hardwear to only do sporadic and reactionary sales contests for when a product wasn’t selling well for example.
With ENDVR, it is so much simpler and quicker, it changed their approach.
“In prior years, sales contests and training would never be part of our planning discussions, but after we signed on with ENDVR, they became a major part of our marketing strategy to support sell-through for the season. We began to present our sales contest calendar and what key products these contests would support. They became a big part of my thought process for GTM preparation.”
Being able to know the exact ROI of each campaign through their custom dashboard on ENDVR was also a game changer for them.
Visual Merchandising Checks
Before using ENDVR, it was difficult for Kelly to track whether the POP they paid tens of thousands of dollars for were even put to use. With ENDVR, they could ask for pictures of their in-store POP displays fully built from as many stores as they want and very quickly get a bank of images.
“The fact that you can now set up a merch check on ENDVR and ask sales associates to post a photo of the POP once it’s installed, that’s huge! There was just no way of keeping track of that before.”
B2B
As mentioned, Mountain Hardwear used ENDVR to increase B2C sell-through with learnings campaigns and sales contests, but they also used it for their B2B relations with retail partners.
On the one hand, they would mention it to buyers, saying that if they bought a certain product, they would help push sell-through with learning campaigns and sales contests.
On the other hand, they would create custom campaigns for their most important doors. For example, they launched a learning campaign built around the particular assortment of a store. Kelly says “Store owners loved it because it was so catered to their store.”
Access to Data
Something that made a huge difference for Mountain Hardwear was the access to data ENDVR provided. It was mentioned a little bit through this case study, but Kelly mentioned that having access to a dashboard where they can see the detailed results of each of their campaigns was one of the best things brought on by ENDVR.
It also greatly facilitates their reporting. During meetings, they simply show the dashboard and it alone justifies their use of ENDVR. Positive ROI.
Plus, this access to data allows them to be logical in their initiatives and therefore to integrate ENDVR in their GTM strategy.
Conclusion
ENDVR solved many pain points that Mountain Hardwear and many brands in the retail industry have. It’s a win-win-win situation for brands, retailers and sales associates. Kelly said “There’s just no easier way to engage retail staff with your brand and then give them sweet rewards for doing it.”
Lastly, we asked her “If you could say something to someone in the same position as you in another company that’s not using ENDVR, what would you say?” Kelly said “If you are in wholesale marketing and you don’t use ENDVR, you’re missing out huge. It will help in so many ways. It will make your job so much easier.”
