Clarins

How Clarins increased nine-fold the number of external sales associates who follow their product training courses.

The key to developing retail sales for beauty brands? Encouraging retailer consultants to take product training courses! By adopting the Reward Solution gift store solution, Clarins has boosted the rate of engagement on its e-learning app.

The context

The products of the Clarins brand, a global player in skincare and make-up, are sold mainly by partners: specialized multi-brand distributors, perfume stores, parapharmacies... The better their sales associates know Clarins products, the more they think of recommending them, and the better they can tell their customers about them, so the more they sell. To this end, the brand offers them training in its products: face-to-face sessions, but above all via an e-learning app, which the sales assistants follow in their spare time.

All this training is all the more important for Clarins as its success has been built over the past 70 years on respect for women and special attention to the customer. These are values that the brand intends to pass on to all consultants, beauticians, coaches and make-up artists who use and sell its products, even outside its own network.

But the hardest part is still to come: making people want to take these courses.

Traditionally, beauty brands ask their field sales reps who visit the stores to offer products to the sales assistants who have taken the training courses. But this organization is tedious on the brand side (order forms to be filled in by hand, no KPI to measure the effectiveness of the incentives...) and the experience on the learner side leaves much to be desired (imprecise or even opaque allocation rules, coveted products sometimes unavailable or handed out “on the run”...).

Clarins was therefore not satisfied with a system that did little to establish a genuine bias for its brand.

The requirement

To make its incentives fairer and more effective, and thus increase the commitment of its sales assistants to its training courses, Clarins has decided to digitalize the management of rewards. The principle adopted is to automatically award points for each validated training session, convertible into products of the brand via an e-shop integrated into the e-learning app.

The solution

Clarins' LMS (learning management system) Teach on Mars, recommended the Reward Solution e-shop incentive management solution, designed specifically for this use case and already integrated with the LMS.

just one month, the e-shop was adapted to Clarins' colors, then the brand filled in the gift catalog and set up the rules for awarding points.

Since implementing Reward Solution, our system has been running smoothly. I spend an average of 10 minutes a day on it, I have indicators to monitor the activity and the feedback from our sales assistants is very positive.

A personalized support, with a Reward Solution project manager dedicated to Clarins, completes the system to respond effectively to occasional requests. And when the brand asks to add a feature or retrieve additional data, Reward Solution's strong integration with the LMS ensures rapid results.

The results

Thanks to this system, the engagement of external sales forces has significantly increased: the number of active sales assistants on Clarins' e-learning app has increased nine-fold in the French market, the first country to deploy the Reward Solution.

With several thousand sales assistants engaged in the rewards program, we managed to mobilize the majority of the French market's indirect distribution network!

The consumption of training has increased so much that the cost of creating a module per person trained has significantly dropped. By digitizing the incentive process, the entire retail education budget is now better amortized.

Finally, Clarins has seen a very positive impact on in-store sales. Field sales reps, who rely on the gift shop to promote challenges and product launches, are thrilled with the results. Everyone is aligned: the final link in the sell-out chain is finally connected