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Celebrating success, enjoying time out and socialising with friends in style – for many, cigars and cigarillos are an integral part of a fulfilled life. Villiger supplies customers with the essential pleasurable goods. The sales force is responsible for the visibility of the products at the points of sale. These sales experts are supported by tailor-made solutions in planning and carrying out up to 70,000 customer visits per year.

However, it is not only in the field of tobacco products that the company has proven to be an outright pioneer. Resource  planning has been carried out using an ERP system since the 1990s. Then as now, Villiger has been relying on SAP solutions. This is also the case in Germany, where a small team of sales experts deals with more than 35,000 retailers every year.

The primary task of the sales force is optimising the visibility of Villiger cigars and cigarillos. How often individual retail outlets are visited within a year largely depends on various actors. The size of the product displays, humidor maintenance and the positioning of the competition are just some of the factors that go into planning on-site visits. A new system is designed to support sales representatives in efficiently planning and systematically carrying out customer visits.

The mission: creating a high-value solution that the sales force will enjoy using. There is no ready-made product on the market for Villiger‘s specific visit management requirements. The complexities of the customer structure and up to 10,000 visit specifications per quarter require an individual solution within the SAP Sales Cloud. The project team from Villiger and B4B Solutions reserved adequate resources for the conceptual design of the tailor-made software. Particular attention was paid to usability and intuitive operation. Impulses for the necessary features came directly from the source – namely, the sales force team.

• Determining the features that are actually needed ‒ for a solution without dead weight.
• Incorporating a complex customer structure and numerous specifications.

CUSTOMER PROXIMITY
Thanks to optimized planning, the most important customers receive more frequent visits. This increases loyalty and opens up new opportunities.

DISTRIBUTION
Evaluating surveys leads to business-boosting insights to improve distribution and ultimately increase sales.

ACCEPTANCE 
High utility and usability ensure user acceptance. Sales are therefore able to focus on their core business.

SUSTAINABILITY
Quality is timeless. Due to intelligent planning and architecture, the customised solution is scalable, expandable and will remain state-of-the-art even in the distant future.

INTEGRATION
The solution is integrated into the SAP Sales Cloud and will therefore benefit from updates and extensions in the long term.
Thanks to its cloud connection, data silos can be avoided entirely. 

ANALYSIS
Data stored in the SAP Sales Cloud is available for analysis and can be exported with a single click. In this way, the office staff also benefits from the solution.

For most sales representatives, a week ends with the planning of visits for the next week. Customized filter options make displaying the account you are looking for in a pool of up to 1,200 customers very easy. Customer data comes directly from SAP Sales Cloud. The filters are designed to match the complexity of the customer structure and scheduling equirements of the customer visits.

First, there are the appointments for “mandatory visits”, i.e. the visit requirements of the channel and key account managers. In the next step, sales experts can use the integrated map to find customers in the vicinity and thus plan an efficient route. On site, the additional benefits of the new solution become apparent. Employees are equipped with a tablet device and enter important information. Data collected via surveys then ends up in the system in real time. Input assistance speeds up the process.

During the visits, customer orders are also entered at the same time. Post-processing is shortened and the data immediately goes into the system, where it is analysed and further processed. The sales force is very pleased with the new solution. Additional extensions to the system are being planned. An integrated route management will assist the staff in the future and the visit planner will soon be enriched by several features. The specification management for customer visits will also benefit from future updates of SAP Sales Cloud.This is a clear advantage of a customized solution based on the SAP standard.

– Collaborative partnership on an equal footing.
– Detailed and generously planned conceptual phase.

PROJECT DEVELOPMENT WITH B4B WAS A LOT OF FUN. TOGETHER,
WE WORKED TOWARDS FINDING THE IDEAL SOLUTION FOR THE SALES FORCE. WE GOT THE BEST ANSWERS MAINLY BECAUSE THE RIGHT QUESTIONS WERE ASKED. EVERYONE THOUGHT OUTSIDE THE BOX AND WAS ALWAYS AVAILABLE. THIS IS ALSO WHY THE IMPLEMENTATION PROCESS WAS SO FAST. WHAT IS ALSO IMPORTANT FOR ME – I HAVE NEVER EVEN HEARD EMPTY PHRASES LIKE “THAT‘S NOT POSSIBLE...” OR “WE CAN‘T DO IT THAT WAY”.

DÉSIRÉE LEERS, CRM MANAGER, VILLIGER SÖHNE GMBH