The Mix finds the perfect recipe for consultant and customer success

Over the last twenty years, Thermomix has attracted a loyal following in Australia and New Zealand with hundreds of thousands of customers enjoying the convenience of the kitchen appliance which chops, blends, streams, sautés, and more.

What many don’t know is that behind the brand’s regional success is a family-owned business, The Mix Australia and New Zealand. 

The Mix was founded by Grace and Witek Mazur in 2001, following a trip to Poland where Grace first saw the Thermomix in action. An avid cook, she was amazed by what it could do and decided to bring one home for herself. 

The Mazurs established The Mix soon after, starting in Australia and expanding to New Zealand in 2009. The business is now the leading independent distributor for Thermomix and growing quickly with sales increasing by 30% in 2020.

Salesforce has set The Mix up for continued success with streamlined workflows and a new portal that empowers consultants to sell more easily. Salesforce has also helped the business enhance the customer experience through faster support and more options to buy.

The Mix has traditionally sold the Thermomix and associated products exclusively through its network of 3,000 sales consultants. Consultants had access to a portal where they could manage sales and input customer data. However, the solution was far from ideal. Consultants had to handle customers’ credit card details and complete transactions themselves. The data collected also failed to deliver any meaningful insights.  

The business wanted a scalable solution that would simplify selling for consultants and propel its future growth. 

“Our sales consultants are passionate about food and enjoy using the Thermomix. It’s their enthusiasm that drives sales,” said Mark Balding, Executive Manager, Business Transformation, Systems and Data at The Mix. “We want to give them tools that make selling easy and allow them to run a business without all the heavy lifting.” 

The Mix chose to deploy Salesforce in 2019 and has since partnered with Silver Lining Cloud Solutions to develop its processes and launch a new consultant portal on Experience Cloud. 

The Mix’s ultimate goal is to enable consultants to manage their business with just one hand on the mobile. Emma Topham, Salesforce Functional Consultant at The Mix, shared that this drive for simplicity is at the forefront of the business’ transformation and how it uses Salesforce. 

“Our aim is to make things as simple as possible and it’s one of the reasons why I personally love Flows within the Salesforce Platform. It lets me build flows and processes which are really easy to follow,” said Topham. 

One of those flows is a faster, more automated onboarding experience for consultants. Instead of asking prospective consultants to complete a paper application form, The Mix now creates an opportunity in Sales Cloud. This triggers an automated message with terms and conditions sent via GetFeedback from the Salesforce AppExchange. Once consultants agree to the terms and conditions, The Mix creates a consultant record that moves from Salesforce to the business’ ERP and then to Shopify—essentially setting the consultant up to manage and track their sales. 

The new onboarding process takes just a few hours from start to finish compared with up to four days in the past. This means consultants can get up and running sooner while The Mix enjoys productivity savings equivalent to almost two FTE. 

The Hub is where consultants go to start selling. The new portal is built on Experience Cloud and integrates with Shopify and Netsuite, allowing consultants to generate custom shopping links or ‘buy buttons’ that they can share with customers directly or post on social media. Any purchases made via these links are automatically attributed to the right consultants. 

“By posting their buy buttons on Facebook or Instagram, our consultants can make sales 24/7. They can then track their sales through The Hub where we’ve used CRM Analytics to embed individual dashboards,” said Topham. “The dashboards make it easy for consultants to see how they’re performing and how they’re tracking against any incentive programs we’re running.” 

The functionality within The Hub has without a doubt made sales processes far simpler. This coupled with increased data accessibility and visibility through CRM Analytics has helped reduce consultant attrition.

The Mix’s transformation has benefited customers as well. For the first time, customers can purchase directly online instead of going through a consultant which is ideal for returning customers who simply want to replace or upgrade their appliance. At the same time, The Mix wants to ensure every customer has access to a consultant who can answer their questions and offer support. Salesforce helps to facilitate this by creating an opportunity in Sales Cloud for every new purchase and assigning it to a consultant. The consultant can then reach out to the customer to see if they would like to connect. 

“We’ve recognised that not everyone wants to purchase through a consultant, but at the same time, we want every customer to get the most value they can from their Thermomix. A consultant can help by showing customers everything that it can do,” said Topham. 

The Mix also has a contact centre team that provides direct support. Service Cloud has replaced a bespoke solution to provide agents with an immediate view of customers’ past purchases and interactions, helping them provide more efficient support via web, email, and phone. Service Cloud has also streamlined case management using features such as queue-based routing. 

Knowledge and Einstein Article Recommendations have been deployed, too, and help agents respond faster to frequently asked questions and drive uplift in customer satisfaction.

The contact centre team is also able to handle a growing volume of requests more efficiently thanks to Knowledge as well as streamlined processes and the use of guided flows. The planned introduction of Live Chat, SMS, Einstein Bots, and social service will add to these efficiencies and offer more customer convenience.

As The Mix continues to grow and transform, it is using CRM Analytics to make more data-driven decisions. The Mix has partnered with Lightfold on its data journey which has included augmenting its sales data with market data from Precisely. Overlaying these two data sets in Snowflake and plotting the results in CRM Analytics helps the business to visualise trends and market opportunities. CRM Analytics has also reduced time spent preparing key reports by 50%.

“We can now start to look at our total addressable market and look ahead to determine what’s changing and where we’ll need consultants in the future. We’re starting to push those insights out to the field as well so consultants can see where they should be focused on selling,” said Balding. 

The Mix has implemented Intelligence to similarly inform its marketing strategies. Intelligence currently pulls data from channels such as Klaviyo and sends it to Snowflake for analysis. However, the marketing team plans to use Intelligence directly in the future to analyse and optimise campaigns and strategies. 

The business is also moving more of its activities and data into Salesforce by using apps like GetFeedback and Form Assembly from the AppExchange and by integrating with apps like Eventbrite. 

“We essentially want to have as much information flow into Salesforce as we possibly can. It helps to power our processes, inform our decisions, and make everything more efficient,” said Topham.