In just six years, Queensland-based Sirromet Wines is well on its way to achieving its goal of becoming the State’s premier winery. It has claimed over 260 awards for its wines as well as the prestigious Queensland’s Best Tourism Restaurant for 2005 award for its Restaurant Lurleen’s.

This innovative winery is not, however, resting on its laurels. It has built a one-stop communications centre for its sales, distribution and marketing teams, based on the Sage CRM solution, to help it process orders more quickly, be more responsive to customer demand, and plan strategic growth.

“It’s not just the wine that needs to flow smoothly when you’re trying to build a great reputation for wine making, " says Ian Parker, Sirromet Wines’ IT manager. "A transparent exchange of information between sales, distribution and marketing is just as critical an ingredient for success.”

Sirromet’s wine is sold by the winery’s mobile work force, and until recently each salesperson was a virtual silo of customer information.

This made it difficult for the company executives to gauge both market trends and customer response to various marketing campaigns. Parker says it also hampered strategic planning.

“As the company grew, we knew we needed to capture important sales information that was in the salespeople’s heads, that could otherwise be lost if a salesperson left or changed territory. That valuable customer information needed to be secured and centralised.”

In addition, Sirromet’s ordering process had become very time consuming. It was not uncommon for sales staff to be on hold for twenty minutes as they waited to phone through their orders to the distributors. Further draining valuable sales time, the sales staff had to provide monthly paper-based reports to head office.

“We needed a way to get sales staff to order in such a way that we could centrally record and manage each customer relationship, but also such that they were freed up to spend more of their time reaching customers,” says Parker.

Sirromet determined that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software would achieve this goal, and also help it obtain the information it needed to plan and execute further growth.

After an extensive review of available CRM  solutions, Sirromet Wines implemented Sage CRM in partnership with CRM technology specialist, Aaromba Technologies.

“We wanted an off-the-shelf CRM solution that needed minimal customisation," says Parker. "The Sage CRM/Aaromba solution came out ahead as it gave us a 90 per cent fit on our requirements and it also had the flexibility to add functionality in the future supported by sound technical expertise.

“The combination of Aaromba’s delivery model and project methodology came out ahead of the competitors.”

The system was up and running in twenty days.

Now every Sirromet Wines sales person has a tablet PC connected by a fast internet link for online ordering via the distributor’s portals, synchronising back to head office and email. That means paper-based reports have been banished, as all order data is automatically available to head office for running reports whenever the decision-makers need them.

Shortly, these figures will also ensure each sales person’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can be measured without the need for extra manual paperwork.

“The best of it is that this won’t require any additional work," says parker. "The information will already be there, recorded as part of what the sales staff do. It will almost be an invisible process.

“This automation will save Sirromet considerably over the next five years in time alone. Not surprisingly the reduction in paperwork has received a very good reception with the team!” he added.

The implementation has also delivered better customer service through faster ordering for customers as well as a much more accurate sales process for Sirromet Wines.

More strategically, through Aaromba’s customisation of the standard Sage CRM solution, Sirromet’s CRM system now delivers daily marketing intelligence direct to the marketing team from the customers. For example, the sales staff conduct continuous surveys of individual retail outlets they visit, noting the number of products ranged and stock movement.

Gary Anderson, Sirromet’s marketing manager, says this combined data greatly assists head office in measuring the ROI of its promotional activity, as well as in monitoring market and industry developments.

"It also allows immediate communication from the management and marketing team direct to the sales staff immediately for any urgent action or information dissemination.”

In the future stock will also be checked online. Moreover the accumulated sales history will be modelled for forecasting and planning.

“We have plans for building historical tracking for sales forecasting in the future,” says Anderson. “We will be able to check that we are being as efficient as possible in our sales efforts.”

“We will also use it to schedule marketing events such as wine tastings, as well as scrutinise all campaigns for effectiveness – something the marketing department simply could not do previously. We will even be able to automate our tasting reports,” he said.

“Although the sales team had a relatively steep learning curve initially as few of them had strong computer skills, the system is proving very popular as it frees them to do what they do best – sell. Aaromba’s training was very thorough, ensuring all sales people hit the ground running,” says Parker.

For information on Sage Business Solutions
call 0800 904 409 or sales.pacific@sage.com

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