V. Suarez (FMCG)

Transcript:

My name is Raul Marcial, I’m the Vice President of Sales at V. Suarez & Co. in Puerto Rico. I’m also the project leader for digital transformation and especially specifically in the commercial aspect of the business, specifically the e-Commerce.

So V. Suarez is one of the major corporations and one of the biggest distributors in the market. We are in almost every consumer good aisles in the market. We do about $600 million in sale. We’ve been open since 1943 and it’s a fourth generation in the family which I have the privilege of being part of. When we started the launches, and we’re seeing how this organic growth of 60 customers, 100, 145, 200, we’re going to be around $450K going through the site, in one group, the hotels and restaurants, which is supposed to be the most sophisticated group, already 15% of the revenue is coming through the B2B, but it’s growing exponentially!

For the customers who have gone to the hybrid model, I’ve seen a growth of the 26% in sales, of replenishment orders and new SKUs coming in, and sales. Customers love it forever. They love it, they have control. They have control of their business. They can check whatever they want, whenever they want, understand their finances, own their information, they love it. This is not a substitution, it’s an optimization of the sales rep’s job. So it’s just adding an additional touch point with the customer. At the end of the day, the sales rep still has to be the protagonist of the experience. So the way that we launched this in our market it’s the slow way and this is my recommendations, because it’s been very successful! You’re explaining the customer the system. The customer, he’s seeing his own personal dashboard for the first time. They love it, they can’t believe it. They see their net pricing, they see all their discounts, they see everything that they have in their own personal dashboard at the same time. At the same time, I am telling the customer everything that the sales rep is going to be doing. Every time that the customer says “So what if I need a new product?” – You talk to the sales rep, “So what if I want to do a wine menu?” – You talk to the sales rep. So you make sure you validate that Omni Channel experience and then suddenly you start seeing the sales rep get all excited, and then suddenly the first week it’s kind of like he’s still nervous, then suddenly organically it clicks, it becomes culture and you see one the sales reps saying “Man I can’t wait to put this customer into B2B”.

For the open catalog, this was very important for us. One of the issues is that It’s a closed page, you need to have a password and username. They way it works is that all the data and all the descriptions and all the item codes and all the pictures, now we have this open website that has all the pictures and everything that we need for the business. So now its our open catalog. So another thing that we actually debated at the beginning was the white label for the app. To have a personalized app its much more intuitive, there is an informal sense of the pride too when you just go to the App Store and next to Candy Crush and Bubble Braker there is the V.Suarez App. So it gives me some legitimacy with everything that you’re doing. My personal opinion is that for the cell phones, the app experience is 1000 times better than trying to be web responsive and fitting in the there too. We have assortment pricing as well too. So if you have for example this watermelon juice and coconut juice and it’s the same size, we were giving the same amount discount for each and if you pick one, it gives it for the other so you have a variety discounts for the SKUs of the same family, so that’s important. What is really important – something that was a game changer for us, for our market especially for restaurants and bars at the free case, free bottle is everything. You know, you could have the biggest discount possible in pricing, the don’t care. They want to see the free case, free bottle that’s like the most important thing. If you order a case of X or Y, you get a case of Z free. So when the customer goes into the cart and sees that the free case is on there, trust, confidence and they love it! They see it and they get it, and it’s worked wonders. Its one the biggest highlights of the system. Most of our provisions and chilled products are sold by the case. But we also have all the wines and spirits that we sell by case or by unit. So you might buy a case but you might buy 3 bottles also too. So one of the things that we wanted to do is that we wanted to make sure that they had the same logic and net pricing as well too. For example, let’s suppose the case had a discount of 2$, well in that case had the discount, but also if you bought 12 bottles it needed to show that discount as well too and Pepperi was able to replicate that logic with everything that we needed.

Another thing that was a big hit was the multi-store and the dashboard the multi-store so having these multi-store buyers where they can pick different restaurants as a store owner worked out pretty well. They changed the store, they changed the dashboards, they changed the credit information, the reporting, the credit limit as well too and he can buy each one of the stores as well too. This was a very big deal! If the product is not available, and you can’t click on it, or click and it doesn’t work, sounds pretty simple right? Now what we’re seeing that instantly it’s not available. They just but something else and the fill rate of the orders has grown just because they are buying things that are available. They adapt to those order changes as well too. So this sounds kind of boring but it was a very big deal.

Credit limit – Big deal! This is something our sales reps really enjoys too. Nobody liked to tell the customer – “you owe me money”, it’s probably the most important part in the selling process but no sales rep wants to do it. The customer does not get med with the system. They don’t get mad, they see it and like, so we have the credit limit, you can click here, and you have all the outstanding payments you can pay and the percentage. If the customer puts an order, it’s like oh you’re overdue and etc… It’s a touchy subject you know. They see it on here, its almost a sense of like – “oh my god, I got to get it done and pay it”. So the sales rep really enjoys the fact that the system’s having the bad conversation. Talking about payments we have specifically ‘pay multiple invoices’. This is a real image of the ability and expectations of the customers here in Puerto Rico. And you can do partial payments as well too.

We have a mandate internally to be the leaders in digital transformations, and everything we do we were one the first ones to do SAP ERP and this is a big steppingstone for us. Especially on the commercial side to be the first ones to fully embrace and lead this process of B2B eCommerce. It’s a sense of pride honestly. Ones you start talking about this additional sales channel that we have, and you know, and I put an asterisk here because we had hurricane in September a diversified risk as well too. Anytime you have another touch point with the customer maybe for pandemic or some problem with, you know we’ve had, earthquakes, hurricanes, pandemics in the last 5 years in Puerto Rico. So anytime we have another ability to increase, to maintain your business going on out there its always going to be a very good thing. So those are the results and benefits and of course since we sell wine, I had to put a little glass of wine on our Thank you.

About V.Suarez Co.

V.Suarez is Puerto Rico’s largest distributors of food, beverages & household goods.

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.