GreatVines: a beverage industry solution that is anything but vintage

GreatVines brings the benefits of cloud computing and salesforce.com’s industry-leading CRM to producers and distributors of wine, spirits, and beer. Designed to address the unique sales and marketing challenges faced by the beverage alcohol industry, the GreatVines application supports trade and consumer marketing, distributor management, order entry, sales goals, trade spend tracking, and more. Because it’s built on the Force.com cloud platform, GreatVines can be cost-effectively customized and deployed, letting companies of all sizes uncork their potential.
 

Great minds think alike

GreatVines was founded in 2009 by Tim Jones and Jim Thompson. Jones had previously worked as a marketing executive for several leading premium spirits companies—including Moët Hennessy—and Thompson had founded a cloud computing consultancy that specialized in implementing custom cloud-based sales systems. The two were working on separate beverage industry efforts when they were introduced by a salesforce.com account executive. They decided to join forces, united by a shared vision of how cloud computing could provide new levels of business visibility and collaboration to highly fragmented beverage industry.

According to Thompson, “Many beverage alcohol companies are still using Excel spreadsheets and highly proprietary systems to manage and track their sales and marketing efforts. Adapting traditional CRM solutions to address the industry’s unique business needs—including three-tier distribution tracking and depletion reporting—is too expensive and time-consuming to make sense for most suppliers.”

Jones and Thompson saw an opportunity to use Force.com to build a new application from the ground up focused on the beverage industry. Thompson explains, “We wanted to build in industry-specific best practices while taking advantage of Salesforce’s best-of-breed CRM functionality and Force.com’s easy integration with existing ERP and supply chain systems.”

Blending a cloud computing solution

Thompson took the lead on developing the application. He says, “Developing the GreatVines application was less than a third the cost of using Java or .NET and was 3–5 times faster. And if we’d used one of the other platforms, we’d have had to make too many tradeoffs, sacrificing security and reliability along the way.”

“There aren’t any toolkits that would give us everything that comes out of the box with Force.com,” continues Thompson. “In addition, Salesforce publishes updates three times a year, so our clients can continually benefit from improvements and new technologies, without needing to purchase more servers or write additional code.”

Jones and Thompson built custom functionality to track things like tasting activities, budgets, cocktail menus and wine list placements. They also integrated data feeds from the Nielsen Beverage Data Network, which tracks wholesale shipments and retail sales in all 50 states. For the first time, beverage alcohol companies can easily link marketing activities and sales data for improved targeting and measurement.

Tasting cloud computing success

One of the first GreatVines customers was the producer of one of Napa Valley’s most sought after wine labels. Demand for the winery’s vintages is so high that consumers must often wait more than 3 years to purchase them. With a high volume of requests and a demanding customer base, the winery needed a sophisticated solution to track orders and inventory.

Using GreatVines, the winery manages inventory and allocations, maintains data on individual accounts, and processes online orders. The winery can tailor allocations based on purchase history, including consistency and conversion by product, seniority, and influence. Although the winery doesn’t release sales numbers, Thompson says, “The application easily scaled to meet the demand for orders when the latest offering became available.”

Because GreatVines needs only minimal customization and doesn’t incur any infrastructure or maintenance costs, it’s cost-effective for smaller niche and specialty providers to deploy. At the same time, larger companies—many of which could afford a tailored on-premises CRM system—also see the benefits of a more flexible, cloud-based system. Today, GreatVines customers include Craft Brewers Alliance (brewers of Kona, REDHOOK, and Widmer beers), Kendall Jackson, and Rémy Cointreau USA.

Raising a glass to the future

Despite the challenging economy, the beverage alcohol industry continues to thrive, and Thompson is optimistic about the future. “Customers are very enthusiastic,” he explains. “We’ve been able to grow our business without the need for outside funding, and now have more than 8 full-time people. Coming from a consulting background, I’m also happy to be in a business with recurring revenue.”

With the Force.com OEM embedded license, the entire GreatVines application can be sold directly to customers, even if they’re not using Salesforce CRM. “Many of our customers are coming from the spreadsheet world,” Thompson explains. “The Force.com OEM embedded license helps us simplify. We can get customers up and running quickly without the need for additional contracts or education.”

Thompson also appreciates the benefits of being part of the overall salesforce.com community, and how it helps his team continue to innovate. In addition to frequent visits to Developer.force.com, Thompson is a regular attendee of local salesforce.com events and the annual Dreamforce conference. “Kona beer was served at the Cloud Expo this year,” he reports. “It was really great.”

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