A few years ago the Tibersoft Team had an idea.
Could claim data be used to drive growth? Up to that point, the focus had been on auditing claim data to be sure clients don’t overpay. Confidence was building that the OPTRADE community was sourcing enough raw claim data – now 35 million rows a month. Naively, we thought calculating white space was the Holy Grail. Take all active operator locations minus active locations for a specific client and voila a precise whitespace calculation. Surely this was a roadmap to money!
But the feedback from Sales kept not making sense.
“Those aren’t duplicates, SUNY Albany really does have 59 locations. But I don’t call on 59 locations, I call on one or two contacts. They make decisions for those 59 locations.” At this point, the Authenticate Module was well into development – Q4 of 2017. Then it hit us. Mapping the parent-child relationships between those that make buying decisions and those locations that get food deliveries was absolutely fundamental.
Mapping the parent-child relationships between those that make buying decisions and those locations that get food deliveries was absolutely fundamental.
I wrote last time about how all the new CRM systems out there don’t know customers. Salesforce, Dynamics, FSE, Sugar, doesn’t matter. They only know what salespeople tell them: opportunities and the contacts that will – very hopefully – turn those opportunities into some volume. It was decided to call CRM contacts “Sell-To” locations – ‘Meet the Fockers’…aka The Parents. Then it was decided to call the existing OPTRADE locations “Ship-To” locations – aka The Children. This is where Sysco, US Foods, etc all deliver. Are some locations both Sell-To AND Ship-To? Sure. But the Bellagio’s of the world are the minority.
Parent location information is not in claim transactions.
Program or agreement names can be very cryptic. Kelly Crouse, Vice President, Sales at The J.M. Smucker Company describes the complexity like this: “the bigger non-commercial operators have multiple ‘layers.’” So grandparents? Grandchildren? Cripes, how far do we have to take this metaphor?
The OPTRADE GEN3 release is the most complex software we’ve ever written.
Now live, the baton has been passed to the OPTRADE Data Mastering Team to train the software what it means to correctly recommend which children belong to which parents.
This is sending the community in an exciting new direction setting up the industry for growth. Before Julius Caesar implemented the Julian calendar nobody really knew the day and time. Staff would show up hours late to meetings. Operating a government to serve 30 million people was very inefficient. We’ve been executing sales in this channel not really knowing the customer. This is a fundamental improvement and source of authentic sales productivity. Here’s how: with CRM systems fueled up with customer information (purchases, distributor & GPO relationships, missed orders, etc) foodservice sales will never be the same.
At our recent GEN3 Relea-zza (release + pizza) Party there was a palpable sense that we’ve made a meaningful contribution to the community.
Here is how Mike Rozum describes his vision for sales ops at Rich Products: “always call on exactly the right decision makers”. We’re with you, Mike.
