Customer Profiles: VinTank and Cruvee

(L to R) Eric Hsu, Patrick Angeles, Paul Mabray and Joel Vincent

Organization Profile: VinTank creates innovative, strategic online solutions for selling and marketing wine in the digital age by threading together business strategy, the realities of global wine commerce, the latest technology, and a strong network of relationships. Founded in 2008 by a team of innovators in wine ecommerce, technology, and social media, VinTank is a specialized development firm that forms a unique bridge between high technology and the wine industry with offices in Napa, Calif.

One of VinTank’s portfolio companies, Cruvee, provides business intelligence and performance management services for the wine industry. With unparalleled abilities to assimilate and warehouse massive amounts of dynamically generated data, Cruvee intelligently parses through information to get key business insights and help its customers make better business and marketing decisions.

Summary: VinTank and Cruvee selected Batchbook social CRM for its flexibility and full-featured contact management functionality to provide valuable insight into its sales processes. Executives now have measureable results from Batchbook that can help them gauge the effectiveness of their activities. Previously, they had little insight into the successes and challenges of their sales cycles.

Websites: VinTank.com and Cruvee.com

VinTank and Cruvee Quaff Wine Industry Insight with Batchbook ‘Social CRM’

On an average day online in April 2009, 7,896 posts were made on Twitter and other microblogging services as well as 1,573 blog or forum posts — all on the topic of wine. These statistics, collected by VinTank, a digital think tank for the wine industry, and wine industry consultant Derek Bromley for a white paper released in May 2009, underscore the value of tracking social media in such a dynamic market.

VinTank recognizes and embraces the usefulness of social media in helping companies connect with customers, partners and other potential associates. When selecting customer relationship management (CRM) software for its own operations and those of its portfolio companies, VinTank executives questioned colleagues via Twitter about the CRM solutions they were using and compiled a short list of vendors and offerings. After eliminating many inflexible solutions, they selected BatchBlue Software’s Batchbook social CRM to organize its customer contact data and manage its sales process and social network.

Sales Process Ripe for Contact Management

Creating innovative, strategic online solutions for selling and marketing wine in the digital age, advancing a process thousands of years old with modern technologies, VinTank could potentially target a range of more than 12,000 established and exclusive brands including wineries, wholesalers and other wine-related companies. With so many potential customer targets, and so much sales and marketing activity, VinTank’s staff is asked to strictly adhere to the VinTank “tried and true” sales process to produce results.

“We needed a CRM solution that was minimalist, yet powerful enough to measure all of our sales and marketing activities and results and meet our robust reporting needs. We ultimately chose Batchbook,” said Paul Mabray, chief strategy officer for VinTank.

Batchbook provides a single source to track contacts, communications and social media activity like blog posts, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr feeds. While Batchbook enables VinTank to add or modify fields or to “Supertag” data sets to more efficiently track the development of relationships from conversations to customers, other CRM solutions were too rigid to accommodate VinTank’s established sales processes, Mabray said.

“We appreciate that Batchbook is very customizable. The flexibility is unparalleled to anything else out there,” said Mabray. “The BatchBlue team worked very closely with us to make sure our solution was tailored specifically to our needs. They have always been very helpful and appreciative of the way we look at our data and our particular sales process.”

The first VinTank portfolio company to put Batchbook to work was Cruvee, Inc., which provides market insight via business intelligence and performance management services to companies in the wine industry. Representing some of the largest producing wine brands in the world, Cruvee helps companies intelligently parse through this volume of information to get key business insights, help make better business and marketing decisions and engage the industry community.

Harvesting Sales & Marketing Data

With his Cruvee team fully immersed in Batchbook, Chief Executive Officer Evan Cover now has a “very large window” to see into his company’s sales and marketing processes. He can see which team members are assigned to which contacts, see the interactions his team has had with the contacts, track accounts to see which accounts were won or lost, and most importantly gain knowledge into why an account may have been won or lost. Cover says he and team members can now quickly identify the necessary steps that need to be taken to successfully close a deal and make corrections in real-time.

“[Prior to using Batchbook] there never was the means to provide valuable insight into this kind of activity around our sales process. We now have measureable results that we can extract from Batchbook to gauge the effectiveness of our activities. This is very important because it directs us to where we are succeeding and to whether we need to adapt our approach in some fashion,” said Cover.

Savoring the CRM Fruits

Since implementing Batchbook in spring 2009, Cruvee now plans to more strategically analyze factors and trends in its sales cycle based on the multitude of meaningful data points it is collecting in Batchbook. VinTank has plans to roll out Batchbook with other portfolio companies such as iWineAdventure and MyWineClubCentral.

“We firmly believe that customer relationship management is the basis of a company’s health. With different employees working on different deals, and everyone coming and going, we now have a whole new level of transparency and visibility into everyone’s work because of Batchbook,” concluded Mabray. “Batchbook is a flexible tool that has allowed our companies to streamline our activities for internal and external success.”