Case Study: Lake Industries
Launched in 1979 as a small cookware distributor in Southern California, Lake Industries has grown over the last 40 years into one of the world’s leading innovators of healthy living products. With a mantra of being customer-obsessed, and supplying some of the largest consumer sales companies, a global network of direct sales dealers and millions of satisfied customers, Lake Industries has cemented its position as an international leader in healthy-living products that are built to last a lifetime.
The Problem
Lake Industries had been using Zoho Books/Inventory for a while before they found us, but it wasn’t customized or streamlined at all. They didn’t have great inventory or financial reporting. They didn’t have great visibility over who their most valuable dealers were or who was dropping out of the customer pipeline. They had a lot of good data, but weren’t leveraging it to make better decisions on who to work with or where to focus efforts. They also weren’t using it well for marketing and outreach purposes. They were a “little blind” as to what was possible within the Zoho ecosystem.
The Solution
To help optimize their processes, we helped them set up a framework that enabled their salespeople to give better follow up with Deals that were falling out of the customer pipeline. We created an automated system for Deal promotion, deactivation, and warnings. We built some better inventory reporting for them to be able to manage stock levels better and automated their commission reporting, which used to be done manually at the end of every month. And, by providing the summarized financial data for each of their customers/Deals, they are now able to use email marketing more efficiently, with better segmentation for direct outreach.
The Outcome
Our reporting and automation set-up for Deal promotion, demotion, and the automatic provision of summary numbers calculated from customers have saved significant man-hours per month. Zoe and Mario, the Heads of Operations, now have more time to focus on growing the business. They were able to launch an online store with a customer portal through Zoho Commerce, which did really well for a while, and, after growing that, can now focus on a pending Shopify implementation (which we are also helping with).
Lake Industries continues to grow! They have been able to prioritize the most valuable relationships with vendors and customers such that their salespeople can stop spending time on effort that doesn’t yield positive results. Their email marketing has been more effective as well leading to a 15% growth in revenue across 2022.