Reyes Beverage Group: From building orders to building businesses.
Before the first “What’ll you have?” is a real person asking, “What do we need?”
Reyes Beverage Company, a national beverage distributor, had become increasingly aware that their time-constrained, back of house customers have little time – and often expertise – to strategize their business profitability, research local competitor pricing, analyze macro trends, or turn data points into actionable business intelligence. So, in a bold move toward customer centricity, they came to Glue prepared to transform their existing limited B2B commerce platform into a highly valued business tool that could do more than build orders: It would need to help their B2B customers at restaurants, bars, on-premise stores build their businesses. At the same time, Reyes was expanding its famed beerline.com to offer a broader portfolio of beverages while also wanting to serve far more customers than their person-based sales force could do alone.
Together we set out to create a best-in-class, digital B2B platform to move them from beer to beverage and beyond, establish an elevated role for digital to deepen and expand the relationship footprint, and digitize and enhance key functions across the distributor ecosystem to make Reyes the partner of choice for both B2B customers and suppliers.
The perfect cocktail: A Game-Changing Digital Product + New Revenue Stream.
Glue started on a journey of digital product development from soup to nuts. We shaped a compelling North Star vision Informed by our competitive analysis, business requirement gathering, and white space definition combined with customer ‘work withs’ and surveys to unearth pain and passion points across all segments. Within months we’d quickly barreled into product and service design, prototyping and testing, market positioning, deployment and KPI framework to yield the most valued feature set, insights and customer experience.
We also saw an opportunity to create a new revenue stream by establishing a high-return publishing and advertising monetization program as a self-funding mechanism for digital B2B, a strategic exponent for their business and an ongoing advantage for their future. The platform enhancements and operations are expected to become fully self funded in the next 8-12 months.
Simultaneously, we were busy naming the platform SipMarket because of the inviting local and communal nature of a marketplace, that despite its vastness of choices, makes people feel connected by making them feel known. We gave SipMarket an entire visual identity, narrative strategy, and compelling communications system. We knew we had to generate excitement, inspire trust and drive adoption as quickly as possible.
Today, Reyes and GlueIQ raise our glasses to SipMarket. It’s not just a new digital platform, feature, or the next evolution of what was. It is our answer to the needs of the Reyes customer. Not just their need to stock up on bevies, but to win. Digital orders now account for a material portion of total sales.
Cheers internally too.
Our experience has been that often internal audiences are the toughest for inspiring belief, and it’s even tougher when the introduction of digital capability can be potentially perceived as a threat. Reyes’ internal sales force had amazing impact and connection with customers, so we made sure to design the right tool that would excite them and make them feel proud, help them build scale, and offload low value tasks to free them up to deliver higher value services that really galvanize relationships. Through an Internal Empowerment strategy, we delivered these critical players in the business knowledge and support through an intranet hub, training webinars, and ongoing communications. And kicked it all off with this compelling celebration of them.
