TL;DR
I remember running a sales route and how chaotic it could be. Most accounts you would walk into, take inventory, talk through an order quickly, and then be on my way to the next stop. Some accounts would simply post a list and I would look for my column and take the order without ever seeing the buyer. Quite a few accounts had buyers who were working the night before and I would have to frantically text them before cutoff time to get a response on what they needed.
If I did get some free time to sell, I would often end up at the craft beer in line behind 5 or 6 other reps to get to the buyer. I often thought there had to be a better way.
Let me introduce you to Connect, VIP’s purpose-built B2B ecommerce platform specifically designed for beverage distribution. This walks you through what Connect is, why we built it the way we did, and how it can be the alley-oop for your sales reps to drive incremental sales and grow market share.
What your retail accounts experience
When a retailer logs into Connect, they are not just landing on a generic product list. They are greeted with an experience that is configured by their distributor with personalized products that are relevant to their business. We built Connect on the concept that any retailer out there has two core actions when placing an order: reorder quickly and discover new products.
The homepage surfaces what matters most. For quick reorders, retailers can click on Reorder and they will be presented with items they have
For product discovery, retailers are presented marketing images that are relevant to their business. Everything they see is a ‘can buy’ item as far as products and marketing. We give quick access to New Items, On Deal Items, Suggested Items, and Trending Items on the homepage to answer the age old question from retailers of “What’s hot and what’s new?” All of this is easily customizable by the distributor.
For retailers that want to do their own digging, our Search provides a top notch experience. We have incorporated typo tolerance for those fat finger mistakes and also utilize associations between products and key words. A Connect search will surface items that are relevant to that specific retailer and understand what they are looking for.
However a retailer decides to shop on Connect, they can add to cart from basically anywhere and that cart will persist over multiple sessions until they place an order. If they’re on the computer placing an order and forgot a particular item that they had, they can open up the Connect app on their phone or tablet and go scan that UPC on a package and have the product description page pop up to order on the spot.
Retail accounts discover more of your portfolio, order more often, and need less rep time to do it.
AI-powered discovery: retailers find what they’re looking for — and discover what they weren’t
Connect has what we call ‘dynamic search’ and learns from every movement of a retailer on the site. If you have an on premise retailer clicking through more keg items and less package items, the images that retailer will see will lean more towards keg items. Search results are dynamically ranked by this search activity to pull forward the brands and SKU’s that are most relevant to a specific retailer. With each retailer session, the results are refined and improved. I guess in a way, Connect is like a cast iron skillet. It doesn’t just get better with age, it gets better each time you use it.
With Connect, you have a real opportunity to gain new placements and increase market share. We built Suggested Items and Trending Items to do just that. Suggested Items looks at a retailer’s purchase history and compares them to other accounts in the market just like them. If it finds something that is selling well in the neighborhood at accounts just like yours, but you haven’t bought that item yet, it will let you know. Trending Items looks at customer journey data within the app and identifies items that are getting a lot of site activity that a retailer hasn’t purchased yet and bring those items forward.
When a distributor dovetails their marketing material around sales incentives, supplier programs, major holidays, and brand launches, Connect is an extremely powerful tool. Now you’re talking about alignment of messaging, combined with new placement suggestions, and it all jives with what you want your team on the street focusing on.
What distributors control through Ecommerce Manager
The retail experience is the star of the show for Connect. What the retailer doesn’t see is the wizard behind the curtain. That’s you. Distributors have customizable control to set their Connect site exactly how they want it. We know this can sound daunting, so we made it as easy as possible.
We call the back end ‘Ecommerce Manager.’ This is where distributors configure the full Connect experience: what widgets appear on the homepage, what custom notifications you want to push to retailers, what kind of reminders and confirmations you want to send and where they go, what marketing campaigns you have running right now, and even what marketing campaigns you’re working on to run next month when the current one ends.
We designed Ecommerce Manager to be extremely user-friendly. The ease of use here is a massive upgrade from previous ecommerce applications at VIP. You don’t need a background in IT to configure Connect. Whomever you choose at your organization from sales, marketing, brand management, etc. can quickly become an expert, making your online storefront relevant and purposeful.
Marketing campaigns aligned with your brand plans
This is where the rubber meets the road for the idea that Connect truly does “connect all three tiers of the beverage industry.” When you log in as a new user to Connect, you automatically have assets pre-loaded and at your fingertips from your suppliers that you can use on your site. Suppliers are adding assets, tagging them with associations, and giving them specific geographies based on where they are. What this means is you get a custom suite of assets at your fingertips that are relevant and ready to go. For example, we have some beer suppliers with full suites of custom MLB assets in the Shared With Me section of the Library in Connect, but you will only see the ones that are relevant to the teams and fan
If you want to create your own assets to use, you can do that too. Bundle different brands together, associate them accordingly. Think of a “Fall
Seasonals Are In” banner with key Oktoberfest and pumpkin products on one image that takes you to a shop page with those SKU’s.
As an Ecommerce Manager, you can schedule multiple schedules of assets to run at one time. Assets are tagged with attributes like ‘on-premise’ or ‘off-premise’ so that a bar or restaurant will see images with taphandles and pour shots and the bottle shop will see the package images. This targeting of marketing again, provides a high level of relevancy to the retailer on Connect.
Distributors who really want to impress… take your brand plans for the year after ABP season, determine your key holidays, new brand launches, and incentives, and then align your marketing on Connect with those plans. You will create a consistent message to your retailers so when they shop online they see the same items that a rep will be talking about when they walk in. Line up your social media with these campaigns, engage with your suppliers to do the same, and now we’re talking!
Retailer behavior analytics: visibility into what’s working, what’s missing, and where the unmet demand is
Another area we kept in mind when developing Connect was how to measure success. Connect has built-in analytics in Ecommerce Manager that will show you depletion data around dollar sales, CE volume, average order value, top selling brands, and top ecommerce accounts. These in-app reports were designed to be visually impactful to cut and paste into sales presentations. They all include a View in iDIG if you want to peel back the onion even further. That button will pull up the exact report in iDIG that fed the report in Connect. Pretty cool.
Connect also tracks every retailer’s movement throughout the site. We call this customer journey data. What accounts search for, what they click, what they add to cart, what they remove from cart, are they looking at deals, how do they shop, how long they spend on a product page, and what displays on their screen.
From this we are starting to add in customer journey analytics to Ecommerce Manager. Our first step in this direction will be search analytics that
All of this leads to a better sales process. Connect is designed to replace the transactional parts of the sales call. What Connect does on top of that is optimize that transactional experience for a retailer. This frees up a ton of time for your sales reps. They can now maybe call on accounts less frequently but more efficiently. They can have the insights to their retailer behavior to come in with a plan to upsell. Connect has the ability for distributors to rethink how they go to market with a team of consultative sales reps instead of a team of order takers.
Visibility into what’s working, what’s missing, and where the unmet demand is — that’s what turns a B2B ecommerce platform into a sales intelligence tool.
How it connects to your route accounting system
We learned a lot from our experience with Retailer Portal and much of what has already been mentioned is from that experience. One of the major differences between Connect and Retailer Portal is the framework of the application. Connect is RAS-agnostic. It was built in a way to sit on top of any route accounting system, whether you use VIP’s Beverage system or another platform.
Orders placed through Connect route directly into your existing RAS. These are not orders that are emailed to reps that need to be punched in. Sales reps see which accounts in their route book have access to Connect and they get immediate line of sight to Connect orders when they are placed. This can lead to consultative conversations with retailers to upsell on new items that a retailer may have missed or needs a little nudge to commit. Sales reps can open those orders, make adjustments, and be on their way.
Your portfolio images and descriptions draw directly from VIP’s Item Catalog which is maintained by your suppliers. Those images, assets, and descriptions appear on your first login to Connect. Item Catalog is free to use for suppliers and we talk to them every day about its benefits. You should too. We’re all in this together.
What this means for the rep relationship
We understand that ecommerce is a major operational change for a distributor. Sales reps will have fear that they are being replaced by this. Smart distributors will see the opportunity to reframe how they go to market with sales consultants instead of order takers. When I worked at a distributor rolling out ecommerce, I used to always say, “this doesn’t change what we do, it just changes how we do it.”
Connect replaces the transactional part of a sales call. It will communicate your entire portfolio (which I am sure is complex and always expanding) better than any one person could. Retailers will get access to new products and sales reps can have better sales calls. This inherently leads to better account engagement, more efficient processes for you and your retailers, a whole bunch of potential new placements, and most importantly happier retailers.
We ran an experiment at the distributor where I worked where we wanted to quantify the time savings for a sales rep when an account gets on ecommerce. I had a real order in hand and called a sales rep to time him on how long it would take to input an order over the phone. It was a normal sized order for this on-premise weekly account, probably about a thousand bucks. The sales rep had to slow me down because he had to pull over, then he had to locate the account in his routebook, then transcribe the order and submit it. All of this took 10 minutes. We did some quick math and realized that a sales rep that had 120 accounts should easily get 30% of their route on ecommerce. If they did that the time savings would equate to about 6 hours that they would get back. That’s about a whole day. We added a whole selling day for each rep by getting accounts online. That’s huge.
Getting started with the Connect Experience Team
So far we’ve talked about the application itself, but I always say the best part of the app are the actual people that come with it. Every Connect distributor is paired with a dedicated Connect Experience Team representative from day one. They manage your technical implementation, review your item data, place test orders, help set up those first marketing collections, and work with you to understand your ecommerce goals and build a solid strategy. They’ll even hop on calls to train your team and then check in on a monthly cadence to help measure success and keep you abreast of cool new features we are always adding to Connect.
Connect was designed with ease of use in mind, and the Connect Experience team can get most distributors up and running in a matter of weeks. It just depends on your schedule and go-to-market strategy.
See it in your operation
We are extremely proud of what we have built in Connect and we love to share our story. The best way to Connect in action is to book a demo. We will gladly take the time to walk through every aspect of the retailer and manager sides of the application, answer your questions, and hear your feedback. We get just as much out of these as our audience does because we walk away with a better understanding of your specific business needs and a few checklist items of how we can make Connect really work for you. So book a demo! We love to host a little show-and-tell.