Hacarem (Food & Beverage)

Transcript of the Interview with Michael Anatol from Hacarem Fine Wine & Spirits –

Hi everybody, I’m going to share with you today a little bit about the path we took to integrate Pepperi within our system in Hacerem. So I’m just going to tell you a little bit about us. Hacerem spirits is a family-owned business, we’re one of the largest in Israel, we were established in 1921 and we’re a leader in the market. We have over 1500 users and around 5000 customers. We only deal with B2B, we have several channels and we’re pretty complicated. When it comes to being complicated we’re pretty complicated because we work on the HoReCa channels (hotel, cafes and restaurants). What we call on trade on-premise consumption and then off-premise consumptions which is shops and retailers etc.

We’ve been on air for exactly now two years so it’s been two years and so we have the perspective to see what impact this has had on our company and the way we do business and it has had a huge impact and still has. We’re still feeling the reverberations ,this integration of the system. It has an impact on the way we work and our results as well.

First of all for us it was super important to have a solution that is proven. We are a very solid type of company, we don’t like taking chances or being adventurous when it comes to these type of things. We had to have something that’s proven, that works, that its DNA. We determined that this solution has to work on all platforms. We had other systems which we examined that didn’t work on all platforms, some worked only on Android, others didn’t have the Web App. We wanted to have all three and Pepperi answered that mean. It was important for us as well to have and be able to implement different types of promotions. This is also something very important that Pepperi provides.

Also editing promotions and monitoring them easily. Something we didn’t have at all before so previously all the promotions were basically punched in manually by our cell phones, what Pepperi has done for us and still does had helped us simplify our promotions, in a way it helped us think and orient our thought towards you know e-commerce and this is also very important because many in many cases organizations like ours just are used to doing things a certain way and they just keep doing that, not questioning the workflow, not examining really what can be done better and to maximize performance.

Another very important thing that Pepperi gives us is the ability to share information. It’s not enough to just sell a bottle of wine, people expect to get the story they want to know more they want to know if it’s organic, where it’s made, who made it etc. There’s a whole story which is very important understanding exactly what type of wine or whiskey the guy wants, when you have close to 2000 SKUs, there’s a lot of room for errors. In many cases our end customer knows far better than our salesperson or our telesells what they want.

Sales interactions are much more efficient today we have a substantial decrease in errors being made. When I ask sales reps, when I ask our administrative assistants etc how many errors were avoided, do you think the answers are between 50 and 90 percent. These are the answers that people say decisively that when we’re talking about our office and support our crew is far far more autonomous today than it was before we integrated this solution. Obviously service has improved to everybody. All the forms and all the service calls go through Pepperi, so it’s very very convenient. Well the company has been growing very aggressively, it’s been growing very aggressively for several years now and I just love being part of it. I just love the fact that the system Pepperi now is just such a part of it where our sales team just they don’t know what we’ve done before. Everybody works on this they just they don’t remember what we, how we worked before. They can’t even imagine what it’d be like to go back. This are the feedbacks that I get from our sales reps all the time and from our customers as well. So it’s great to see how this platform is a part of such an aggressive growth. Also it serves the entire supply chain not just it has implications on the way our warehouse works, our logistics, everybody.

We’re very happy with the results, we’re also very happy with the percentage of our income going through storefront orders and you know we were seeing this whole thing change a dramatic change that we’re very happy with the numbers. I’m not going to share the exact numbers of course but just to give you an idea we are roughly when you’re talking about the percentage of orders coming from storefront or from storefront orders we’re roughly around over twice as better than I thought we would have been by now. It’s been going very very well. Another great sign for me is that our team, our crew keeps coming to me and asking for more and more things more and more solutions and this is a great indicator that they’re happy they want more because eventually it’s our team, it’s our crew that they’re using it and also but by the way customers we know that our sales team are doing great job everybody’s doing a great job too. It’s not just a system it’s how you use it and so I’m not trying to say oh it’s only due to Pepperi of course but it’s enabled by Pepperi and that’s the key.

About Hacerem

Hacarem Spirits is the leading importer of wine and spirits in Israel, established in 1921.

About Pepperi

Accelerate growth, reduce overhead & improve transparency by connecting your field sales and e-Commerce on a unified, flexible, enterprise-grade platform.

Pepperi is a Cloud-based B2B sales platform used by leading brands and wholesale distributors to connect all B2B sales touch points, to deliver a seamless purchasing experience.

We empower our customers to sell bigger, smarter and faster, by integrating B2B eCommerce, sales force automation, retail execution, and route-accounting on a single, highly flexible platform, that runs natively on all mobile devices.