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Double Your Revenue Selling Wireless Solutions

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White Paper: Double Your Revenue Selling Wireless Solutions

Improving its wine and spirits customers' data via mobile applications is leading to this VAR/ISV's(independent software vendor's) 100% revenue growth. To understand the secrets of VAR/ISV Inventiv Software, LLC's success, you need to learn a little bit about where this company earns its living — the wine and spirits market. But, although Inventiv Software sells exclusively to wine and spirits distributors, the company's business strategy is applicable to other vertical markets such as healthcare, manufacturing, and retail. The fact that Inventiv Software has garnered a 70% market share within the wine and spirits market segment and has more than 10,000 users (mostly sales reps) of its mobile sales ordering and survey platform says a lot. The fact that Dave Rea, founder and president of Inventiv Software, was willing to share some of the strategies behind his company's projected 100% revenue growth, which VARs can apply to other vertical markets, is even more paramount.

Dave Rea is a former IT director of a regional wine and spirits distribution company. Having a firsthand understanding of the rules and regulations of this market is a major competitive advantage. (If you're selling to the healthcare market, do you employ or partner with anyone that has healthcare experience?) In the wine and spirits market segment, each state sets its own laws governing the sale and distribution of alcoholic beverages. For example, some states, such as Pennsylvania, are control states, which means the government runs the liquor stores. At the other end of the spectrum are open states, such as California, which allow nongovernmental businesses to buy and sell liquor.

Inventiv Software's solution has been a hit with distributors, but the VAR noticed it still didn't solve the communication problems between distributors and suppliers regarding the surveys. Even though distributors could turn surveys around more quickly, suppliers still conducted their own surveys, which yielded conflicting results. Possible reasons for the disparity could include how the questions were asked by the suppliers vs. the distributors as well as the survey sample size (e.g. a supplier will typically survey 20 customer locations, whereas a distributor will survey nearly 200 stores and restaurants).

After uncovering this problem, Inventiv Software went to work to find a solution. "Suppliers don't need all the sales ordering and inventory lookup functionality of our software as distributors do, but they do need all the survey and reporting capabilities," says Rea. "Suppliers have little interest in managing survey and reporting applications in-house; they just want the results." Inventiv Software redesigned its software to meet suppliers' needs, and it added a couple of servers to its data center to host supplier survey data. The VAR even developed middleware, which enabled distributor surveys to be copied to the same repository as suppliers' surveys (e.g. if Bacardi conducts a survey, each of its suppliers will automatically receive an electronic copy of the survey results in their database). The VAR approached prospective suppliers (a large number of suppliers are listed in trade association publications) and allowed them to try the solution for 30 days.

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White Paper: Double Your Revenue Selling Wireless Solutions