How Casper Sleep Revolutionized Mattress Selling | Leading Through Change | Salesforce

Sam.

A good night's sleep is a major part of self care and I'm prioritizing self care this year. I mean, sleep is the only time of day that I can just escape from the headlines and life worries that seem to have no end. I mean, I could use a nap right now. But of course, a good night's sleep starts with no surprise, a good mattress. Good morning, I'm Leah McGowan Hare and welcome to another one of our live weekly conversations as part of our Leading Through Change series, a chance for you to hear from leaders around the world who are doing their best to get through these challenging times and support their communities. Before I hand it over to my colleague Shannon, I want to preview the next hour. Shannon will be interviewing Emily Rl, president and Chief Commercial officer of Casper Sleep, about how Casper revolutionized an industry with the power of Salesforce Customer360, the number one CRM. We'll then dive into a special demo by Mike and Matthew to highlight how companies can use sales cloud and service cloud together to provide a great experience with their customers, getting close closer to them with a single source of truth. After that, we'll be treated to a very special conversation and musical performance by singer, songwriter and actress Mandy Moore. Now, before we begin, make sure you check out the Leading Through Change on the360blog for more information on our Leading Through Change trailblazers, thought leaders and customers. You'll see which Salesforce tools they're using and how they use them and the benefits they're seeing. And as we do every week on Leading Through Change, we wanna uplift and empower others. When it comes to racial equality, we all have an urgent responsibility to act today. We wanna bring the full power of our community to help in the fight against systemic racism and violence that has and continues to affect the black community for far too long. Sadly, there's still so much work to be done on this path toward racial equality. If you can, please go to Salesforce co NAACP donate and make a donation today. Again, that's SFORCE co NAACP donate now. Excuse me. Now it's my pleasure to kick it over to a conversation with that my colleague Shannon Duffy had with Arielle. Thank you.

Thanks, Leah. I am so pleased to have Emily Orrell here with me today. Emily is a retail veteran who's acted as CEO of several brands including Full Beauty and quidsi. After starting her retail career at the Gap in Target, she's now president and Chief Commercial officer for Casper Sleek. Now, we all know Casper, right? They're not just any other mattress fan. It burst onto the scene in 2014 with the wild and widely rejected idea to sell mattresses online. After many viral unboxing videos, celebrity investments, and a Kylie Jenner tweet later today, Casper is a 400 million a year business. In a world where buying a mattress online is completely normal. I know I have a Casper in my home. My son loves his Casper mattress. So I'm so excited to talk to you, Emily, and let's give her a big virtual round of applause.

Thank you.

All right, so thank you so much for joining us, Emily. I know it's a crazy time for retailers, and I appreciate you taking the time and speak to our audience to tell us a little bit about what you know. So usually in leading through change, we talked about how businesses had to digitally transform. Digitally transform quickly. But the great thing about Casper is you guys are digital first. You're a digitally native. So when the pandemic hit, you were probably a little bit ahead of the curve. So can you talk a little bit about how having those structures in place helped you really weather the storm over the past year?

Yeah, I'm happy to be here. Thank you for having me. You know, I remember being out to dinner with my entire team in Manhattan on March 10, including my team members from Europe. And a few days later, we closed all of our stores. And so, you know, this kind of change is like nothing we've ever seen before. I would say a lot of people have described this as a pivot, and this is much more than a pivot. And I think for us, being a company that was born, being digital really allowed us to move faster. With a rapidly changing environment over the past year, clearly with the closures and with people staying home to keep safe and keep other people safe, consumer habits shifted because they had to. This was a forcing function for change. That being said, customers are still shopping across many channels. I think more people than ever have ordered groceries online in the past nine months. But I think you'd be hard pressed to find people who haven't been to the grocery store at all since March. And so while shopping has changed and consumers trends have shifted very, very quickly, our strategy hasn't changed. And that's really to reach customers wherever they choose to shop. And for some, that is online, and for some, that is in Casper stores. And for some, that's in many of our retail partners like Target and Amazon or Costco. And what's important to me and what's important to our brand is that wherever you choose to interact with our brand, it's like a consistently joyful experience. I love that.

I know when I bought my Casper mattress, it was joyful. So it's so amazing to hear. So what do you feel is going to be your top priorities and challenges to tackle for the next six months? Like, everything's still changing. We're all kind of living day by day. People are going to emerge from the crisis. And how is Casper thinking about that?

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think all of us are thinking about both personally and professionally, how do we reemerge from this? When do we reemerge? How does the world change? What does normal even look like? And I think it's really causing a lot of stress and anxiety for people, and that affects the way people sleep. And this is really our priority and will continue to be our priority as we had through the rest of the crisis and hopefully out of it sometime in the near future. That's really the reason I joined Casper was because I truly believe in the power of sleep, especially after I had two children. But we are focused on designing and reshaping, really, the future of sleep with the customer at the center of everything we do. We want to explore all the avenues of sleep. Sleep is not just about the mattress or the pillow that you lay your head on and really continue to innovate around the bedroom and the home space while maintaining that connection with the customer. I think hearing you say, I love my Casper mattress, my son love, love Casper, if you think about it, is a pretty wild thing to say, I love a mattress, or I love a company that makes mattresses. And this will really continue to be our mission. I think at a time like this, when so much is pivoting, is the time when it's most important to stay true to your mission and your vision and who you are as a brand. You know, turbulent times sometimes make us question what's happening and pivot all around. But for us, people are thinking more about way they're consuming everything, the way they're consuming health, the way they're consuming food, the way they're consuming buying things around them. And I think we continue to modernize this outdated industry of sleep, which is really what Philip and the other founders set out to do over six years ago. And so we want this to continue to be joyful, and that's really what we're going to prioritize as we go forward.

Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, I think there's many things that have united us in this crisis and the need for sleep to help us get it through is amazing. So talk to me a little bit more. You mentioned that Casper, is it just mattress. You are actually revolutionizing sleep. Can you talk about the different pieces and why exactly you guys chose to move in that direction?

Yeah, absolutely. Sleep is not just about your mattress. It's about everything that surrounds you and it's about what happens during your day. So we talk a lot about the sleep arc all the way from when you think about going to bed, which might be at 9 in the morning, it might be at 4 in the afternoon, all the way to falling asleep to waking up in the morning. It's about what's on your mind when you lay your head on the pillow. And so our decision to broaden the brand was really informed by data from our Casper Labs R and D, really state of the art program where we think about sleep innovation, we think about ergonomics, we think about product excellence. And from our research, we really understand what does the customer want from us and what do they think that we should be giving to them. We know people want to sleep better and we know it's hard and sometimes mysterious. You can't just say to someone, well, go to sleep, go to bed. We all know this with children, it's not that simple. And people right now are investing more, more in their homes, investing more in their sleep. And so for us, when we think about products like pillows, sheets, weighted blanket, your bedside light, the temperature in your room, all these contribute to a night's sleep. And we want to be there to help you. We want you to want to go to bed, to want to be in your bedroom and for your bedroom really to be a sanctuary of Casper. I love it.

I love it. I need the sanctuary of Casper in my bedroom right now. Don't we all? It sounds amazing. So talk to me a little bit about trends in shopping behavior mentioned when we first started talking sort of about being where the customer is, maybe sort of multi channel. I'm really, really curious what you guys are seeing at Casper and what you expect in the future.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's been a lot of shifts and trends. I think some of them are more applicable to our business specifically and some are just a little bit broader based. I think for the most part what we've seen in the last nine, 10 months is really trends that were already in the market just speeding up at a pace we've never seen before. That come to mind, obviously, the shift to digital. We couldn't have imagined a world where stores literally weren't open. Right. I mean, we wouldn't even be able to imagine a year ago that stores would be closed on Thanksgiving, let alone close for months at a time. And so I think, you know, grocery shopping is a great example where people were very reticent to shop online. And overnight that changed. And I think those trends will continue and maybe go backwards a little bit. But I think people see the ease of doing that and will probably, you know, it's a very sticky thing. Will probably stay. I think brand loyalty is another one. I do believe people are being more loyal to brands that they know and they love. During this crisis, we've really seen an increase in our products outside of mattress. So a lot of people coming back to buy sheets or pillows or weighted blankets or silk pillowcases or buying them with their mattress where maybe before they hadn't. And I think part of that is I only want so many packages coming to my house or I want them to brands I know are going to ship on time or that I know I can get a hold of if I need to. And I think that's important to people. I would say thirdly, and this is very obvious, but the focus on the home, right when we are sitting in our homes all day long, you think to yourself, I can't stare at that wall for one more minute if I don't hang art up or I can't sleep in this bed for one more night because it's so uncomfortable. I mean, we used to spend almost 70% of our times outside the home and now we're spending almost 100% inside. It's just changed the way we think about it. And along with that, a lot of people leaving the city and moving to the suburbs. And that's good for us because it means more bedroom. Then I would say lastly, which we already talked about a little bit, is wellness. We are all, and I think this is a great thing, prioritizing self care more than ever. And I think we finally understand that it's not cool to say I only need four hours of sleep. That sleep is a big, big part of wellness. I think all of us know how we feel the next day if we didn't get a good night of sleep. When I first met Philip, he said to me, imagine if every night people got all the sleep they needed. Imagine a well rested world. We'd all be kinder and more efficient and smarter. It's hard to imagine what that world could look like. And that's really what we want to bring to the world. But I think those are four of the things I'm really seeing which impact our business a lot and just impact the way people think about shopping.

Yeah. I am not a nice person on four Hours, so I love that. And it's really important. It truly is fundamental to who we are as people. So that's great. So talk to me a little bit more about relationships. You mentioned sort of fostering this relationship at Casper and what's the importance of this relationship and what are you doing to really build this relationship as you make that move beyond mattresses to all the sleep things that you mentioned? Yeah.

For me, at the heart of it is trust. Right. I mean, we are asking people to trust us with a third of their lives. That's how much you should really be sleeping in your life.

That's a big deal.

So when you're making a decision on a mat or a pillow or the sheets or the light by your bed, we're asking you to trust us that we've done the research and we've done the product development and we've made the right functions and technology that are going to help you get the best night of sleep possible. And I think through our sleep specialists in our retail stores, through the specialists and our retail partners who we train personally and through all the way, we try and explain our technology and our products on our website, that's how we want to convey that trust to the customer. Saying, we get you. We have somebody who studies ergonomics on staff, testing our beds, testing our pillows. We want to do that work for you so that you can just sleep better.

That's amazing. So I love this concept of making sleep joyful, this whole experience joyful. But I have a question for you because I think a lot of people watching probably struggle with this. How are you at Casper? How are you approaching the balance of maintaining that brand authenticity to see like that authentic relationship and then the distinction every touch point. So online in stores and retail partners, like, what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I mean this is not easy. Right. And this is one of the reasons why there aren't many omnichannel brands that can be in. You know, 26 retail partners like we are have a great e comm business and have their own owned and operated stores and maintain the authenticity and voice of their brand. It's really hard. And so I think, you know what, we're really focused on meeting the consumer where they want to shop.

Right.

If you think about this is maybe a pre Covid journey, but somebody might be walking through a Target store and they might see our pillow on an end cap and they may say, oh, I've never heard of Casper before. And they go home and they look it up on their phone and they see Casper and then they see our ad where they're watching CNN that night. And then they're at Short Hills Mall and they see our store and they pop in. We have to be consistent in all those touch points so that by the end, when they decide to buy, when they decide to be in the mattress buying journey, we are first on their mind. You know, this is a very different business than, you know, when I was at Gap and we're selling T shirts and jeans. You're only buying a mattress every seven to 10 years. And so we need to keep our brand in your consideration set. When you walk into our stores, if you've been in them, the music is low, the lights are dim. You can book a nap and pull the curtain back and sleep for 20 minutes in one of our beds and try our pillows, sheets. What we're trying to give you is an experience that doesn't feel like you're in a mall or in a strip center, but feels like you are in your bedroom. And you can imagine what our wave hybrid would be like if it was in your room. And so you can really figure out, is this the right bed for me? And we try and emulate that experience in our retail partners and on our website to give you a true understanding of what your sleep will feel like with Casper.

That's amazing. Your approach, I love it because it is customer obsessed. Like the ability to go take a nap, like I want to take a nap now. And I think salesforce, we think of ourselves as customer obsessed as well, and we believe technology plays a huge role. So talk to me about how you're sort of uniting your teams with technology to develop those deeper relationships with your shoppers.

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, we continue to do really extensive R and D research on what our customer wants and what they need. In terms of technology, where I really focus my teams is to make sure we are providing technology that matters to the customer. I see a lot of brands chasing things because they're cool or someone else is doing them. And sleep isn't always about that. Technology doesn't have to be something that plugs in. And that's what I have our team really focus on. We think about technology. The way we layer our foam is proprietary technology. Our gel pods and our wave bed is technology. Our pillow, our standard pillow, which if you don't have you should get is amazing is a pillow in a pillow and we have some really exciting technology coming up in our products in 2021 that I'm really excited about. When I first came to the company, one of the things our founder Jeff Chapin told me about was our humidity fighting duvet. It's a duvet that has wool in literally pulls the heat out from your body because probably almost everyone as we know from our research in the middle of the night kicks their covers off and puts their feet outside the bed for cooling and and this duvet does that for you. And so these are the kind of cool technologies that we have in our product that you can't find elsewhere that maybe aren't the first thing when you think of technology for sleep.

I love it.

My husband we're getting that duvet for that is a very often move. So Emily, thank you so much for talking to us on leading through change. I really enjoyed our conversation and I wish you all the best and I think I'm going to go take a nap so thank you.

Yes, I wish you great sleep and have a great new year.

Thank you so much Leah, back over to you.

Wow, that was a great conversation. I loved what Emily said. Imagine a well rested world which makes me think we should have like world nap day where we all just nap all day. What a world. That was an amazing conversation. Thank you so much. Now I'm excited to hand it off to Mike and Matthew for more on the power of sales cloud and service cloud over to you.

Thanks Leah. Winning in today's world with digital transformation is about people and best in class processes, not just technology. This demo is about empowering sales and service to work together from anywhere. I'm Mike, a sales rep from M and M Furniture, an office supply manufacturer. I use the complete power of Sales Cloud360 every day. Most mornings I'm returning from a run and then bouncing around between customer meetings. I have a new account that just got assigned to me so I don't have much time to ramp before my 9am meeting. Luckily I have a secret weapon. Salesforce meetings. Salesforce meetings help make meetings more engaging. How? With meaningful prep, a captivating presentation and easy follow up all in CRM. After a cup of coffee, I review the meeting digest. Since small talk is tough before the caffeine kicks in, I rely on LinkedIn, Sales Navigator and CRM to find a few icebreakers. I'm excited to see an attendee graduated from my university so I'll throw in my university hat. As a conversation starter to the right, Einstein highlights key meeting insights for me. Here, I'm notified that a key decision maker may not show up. I'll make a mental note to record the call in case that happens. Below, Einstein surfaces Communication Insights so I'm aware of what topics may come up. Finally, I'm alerted of any major support cases that are going on, so I know what topics to address or avoid. Now that I'm prepared, it's time for the call. With meetings, the video call is engaging for everyone. Presenters and the presentation are neatly laid out side by side. Best part? It works with almost any video conferencing platform. Behind the scenes, I can organize my files in one place so I don't have to switch between a million tabs. We all know that with so many meetings, follow up has to be fast. Once the meeting is over, Einstein scans the transcript to identify things I committed to and automatically schedules my next meeting. This gives me some extra time to check on my cat. She's been begging for attention while I'm doing that Einstein call. Coaching is hard at work analyzing the video conversation. It'll surface insights I can review with my manager during my next one on one. Now that my meeting is done, I have about an hour to do follow up before my virtual volunteering event. Thankfully, High Velocity Sales is not just for inside sales anymore. It's embedded in my opportunity and helps me figure out who to reach out to, when and how. A key feature here is sales cadences. Cadences build on best practices and automate next steps to help reps like me quickly build that new muscle of selling virtually. Some of you on this call might think pricing and quoting is hard. Well, it's never been easier with Lightning flow for Revenue Cloud, an embedded workflow helps me quickly create a customer quote without leaving the console. Now let's fast forward a bit to see how we help retain loyal customers. Over to you, Matt.

Thanks, Mike. Hey there. I'm Matt and I'm the other M in M and M Furniture. I'm responsible for handling all customer service questions and I use Salesforce to do that. With so many people interested in renovating and updating their office, our customer support requests have shot through the roof, so I need something that can scale for our business. So let's see what an average day looks like for me. I log in for the day, get my handy dandy headset on, and I see a voice call come in. This call is being routed to me based on my skill set and availability. It's Richard from Presidio Tech As I accept the case, I can see all the relevant information about Richard. Loyalty, status, purchase history and more are all available for me to see on one single view. Instead of having to log into a separate portal or ask a redundant question to our customer, I can get all this rich information all in one place in the middle of my screen. The call is being transcribed in real time so I can focus on the conversation and on next steps rather than note taking. So Richard says that they have some questions about installing their social distancing partitions they have just purchased. He wants to find out what's the best configuration for his office. Now let's take a look at what's happening on the right hand side. Einstein AI has been able to take in information from this conversation as well as previous cases and suggest that the best next step is to schedule an appointment with a skilled technician who will safely go into their office and help with the installation. So I click on the suggestion and that kicks off a flow to schedule the appointment. Now these times are automatically being surfaced to me based on our team's skill set, proximity to job site and other factors. This is great for us since we can easily see the times that work best for our business to minimize cost as well as risk. In the past I would have needed to schedule things manually through an Excel spreadsheet, and knowing me, I'd probably make a few mistakes along the way. But with flows I can be sure that every time I'm completing an important process, I'm capturing the right data every single time the appointment is confirmed. But check this out. Based on the context of the call, I get prompted with an upsell opportunity for Richard. Since lots of office managers have questions about reopening, we started offering a new subscription service where an M and M associate helps guide our customers through this transition. Richard is interested and an opportunity is automatically created. What's incredible is that this workflow gets passed to Mike to finish up and close. Mike has access to all the notes and case info I've just worked on, so he has a better understanding of what our customer needs. This is the power of having sales and service all on one platform. We are better together now. Mike and I here at M and M Furniture can seamlessly handle cases and sales quicker than ever, providing a great experience with our customers at the center. Thanks so much for listening. And with that, back to you Aliyah.

Thanks Mike and Matthew, that was great. And if you want to learn more about how sales and service can work better together, check out our demo video available at the link on the screen. SFDC code, sales dash and service together. Now, you all know the drill if you want to see today's musical performance. And it's not an if you want to see it. And the interview with the one and only. That's right, Mandy Moore, please go to Salesforce Live right now. That's salesforce.com live. So if you're watching us on Twitter, head on over to Salesforce Live. We'll be waiting for you.