Headspace brings wellbeing to more workplaces with Salesforce.

In his early twenties, Andy Puddicombe was a typical student. But when life took a series of sudden turns, he made the radical decision to cut his studies short to pursue a different path. After years of travel and study, he was ordained as a Buddhist monk and moved to London with the mission of demystifying meditation and making mindfulness accessible to the masses. There he met Richard Pierson, an advertising executive who became his co-founder and partner in running mindfulness events around the city. Demand for their events was so great, the two launched an app in 2012 as a way to reach more people.

The app, which they called Headspace, caught on – reaching more and more members looking for some help in being kinder to their minds. In 2017, Headspace spun off a B2B business called Headspace for Work, which offers mindfulness products and services to companies to help them build healthier, more productive cultures and higher performing organisations. In 2018, Headspace adopted Sales Cloud to help operate their Headspace for Work business. The sky seemed to be the limit for Headspace.

When COVID-19 caused a wave of collective stress and anxiety for the world, the growing need for mental health resources came into the spotlight. Ten years in, the Headspace story might now be entering an even bigger chapter.

While very much still a small business, Headspace now counts more than 65 million users in over 190 countries. The Headspace app sports a near-perfect 4.9 out of 5 star rating from more than a half million reviews on the Apple App Store. The company’s mission to improve the health and happiness of the world is well underway.

Starting a dedicated business-to-business (B2B) program, known as Headspace for Work, was a strategic move designed to further the company mission. Headspace knew it would take a lot of planning, work, and time to make inroads with some of the world’s largest organisations. The company brought in a Global Sales Development Manager, Alexandria Smith, to grow the B2B business. Smith knew from the outset her team would be navigating the same types of growing pains Headspace’s founders faced when they got started in 2010. She also knew Headspace had been using Salesforce. The historical sales data in Sales Cloud would help her with strategic planning.

COVID-19 spread across the globe in early 2020, disrupting countless lives and businesses in its wake. Anxiety levels rose everywhere. People started looking for ways to adapt to uncertainty and manage their own responses to the crisis. They needed things they could do while working from home. Organisational leaders looking to support employees turned to Headspace in droves.

“Our inbound funnel expanded,” Smith said. “Awareness of the importance of protecting and supporting employees’ mental health increased across the U.S. and abroad, and so did the demand for enterprise solutions such as Headspace.” Salesforce was there to help Smith and her team welcome everyone in.

Outbound marketing hit the brakes and pivoted to handle the flood of incoming inquiries. “With the increased interest in Headspace’s enterprise solution, the team made some strategic changes across our go-to-market teams to address the increase in demand and support organisations as quickly as possible during these very challenging times,” Smith said. Sales Cloud lead scoring was configured to filter the highest priority leads as they came in. The system routed those leads to the right sales reps for immediate follow-up. Salesforce reports discovered unconverted leads. Outbound sales reps were reassigned to those leads for follow-up.

Headspace for Work leveraged Salesforce’s standard reporting functionality to better understand the effectiveness of their campaigns. Smith’s team used lead routing to pinpoint the healthiest leads and assign them to the right sales representatives. From there, the sales team was empowered to make smarter decisions about which markets to invest time into growing.

The team also tapped Salesforce Inbox and Einstein Activity Capture to document emails, calls, and other touchpoints with customers and turn them into actionable next steps. They targeted prospects and markets globally, using data from Salesforce to back their decisions. Salesforce helps Smith’s group nurture B2B relationships by making sure no conversations fall through the cracks at any point in the customer lifecycle.