In the highly competitive wine industry, producing great-tasting wines is not enough to ensure success. Without a super-charged sales team, even the best vintage runs the risk of gathering dust in a cellar. For DGB, a timely technology intervention has empowered a high-performance sales team with real-time insights into sales, orders and retail execution.
DGB is one of South Africa’s largest independent wine and spirit producers and distributors, operating out of the Western Cape. The company was formally established in 1990, although its roots stretch back more than 300 years when winemaking commenced at the historic Boschendal and Bellingham farms in the Cape Winelands.
Pieter Steyn, Commercial Manager at DGB, says the business faced several challenges that were undermining its sales efforts. These ranged from a lack of accurate reporting integration of master data across platforms, to timely placing of orders and missing data from surveys.
“It was also taking too long to add new customers to our database,” adds Steyn. “We needed a solution that would help improve product visibility in stores and ensure perfect store execution by sales representatives.”
DGB chose the SAP Sales Cloud Retail Execution (ReX) solution and worked with implementation partner Consnet to design and introduce the solution into the business. Despite the implementation of the solution being the first of its kind in South Africa, the implementation team managed to finish the high-level design, application setup, solution build and user acceptance testing within a mere three months.
According to Steyn, it was essential that the system could integrate all business functions and processes in real time to help manage the large team of salespeople effectively.
“By turning data into actionable insights, we increase our team’s productivity while also enabling better business decision-making based on accurate and real-time reporting data,” explains Steyn. “Within a few days of go-live, more than 1000 visits were completed, of which 946 were recorded as Perfect Score visits based on KPIs and store performance. This has enabled us to bring to life our core value of achieving excellence in every aspect of the business.”
Since the implementation of SAP Sales Cloud Retail Execution, DGB has been able to capture a multitude of orders via sales representatives and routed to the call centre via the new solution. “Sales managers also now have a view of their sales representatives’ movements for a day, and can track their visits and perfect store execution,” says Steyn. “This has helped drive the desired behaviour within our sales department and bring to life the benefits of the solution.”
Cameron Beveridge, Regional Director for Southern Africa at SAP, believes the implementation of the new solution has come at a vital time. “In light of the events of the past year and the ongoing disruption to business-as-usual, the ability to harness an effective sales team to build close relationships with customers has never been more important. The new solution, combined with the continued support of our partner, Consnet, will empower DGB with improved sales efficiency and, ultimately, deliver benefits to the business that will extend for years to come.”
