The Challenge: Scaling and Transforming Operational Processes

Kiva Sales & Service built a strong GTM system to help them scale. They could track customer inventory levels, prompt reorders, and give the sales team recommendations in their ERP (Encompass). As they grew, they found themselves sitting on a large amount of data and staffing team members on data entry to make the system run. KSS had to react to each customer's different, changing requirements and standards. KSS knew if they could properly harness the potential of this information, they could provide a better customer experience, increase order size, velocity, and win more shelf space. 

KSS has access to point-of-sale data, ordering patterns, and sales activities. Kiva’s commercial operations team manually provided customer, product, and ship-to understanding to power this system. However, as they grew, manual analysis couldn’t keep up. They had a backlog of 100,000 unmapped products between their system and all the data they were feeding in from their customers. And their commercial operations team was spending hundreds of hours each month on data entry. As they activated new products and stores, this problem was only going to get worse.  

Kiva Sales & Service knew they needed an automated solution to proactively understand and automate their sales operations at scale.

The Solution: Automation and Intelligence with Pantry AI

Arming themselves with data

Kiva Sales & Service approached Pantry AI to help with product, customer, and ship-to understanding. Pantry was able to standardize KSS’s 100,000 product combinations in less than a day. From there, Panty AI was able to help KSS automatically unify store-level insights, provide the sales team with intelligent upsell and swap recommendations, and predict when customers may be running low on inventory. 

Using informed data, KSS increased revenue, order size, velocities, and customer happiness using the systems it already had in place.

Automating manual processes

For the same reasons that POS data was piling up, there was a tremendous amount of manual order entry in the sales and commercial ops teams. Every customer has a unique way of doing things, making it impossible to have one standard process. 

Using Pantry, the three-person commercial operations team was able to change their footing from reactionary and flooded with data entry to scaled and proactive - freeing up time for revenue-driving activities. Pantry gave each team member an extra week per month in saved order entry. This allowed them to take on more orders from the sales team, along with other tasks to move KSS forward. The three-person commercial ops team was entering 1k orders from inside and outside sales teams. Some orders can take 3 hours. Using Pantry, they can reduce the time to a click of a button, making it straightforward to enter orders from any customer into the ERP (Encompass).  

Pantry used wholesale product, customer, and ship-to understanding to free up time for the sales team, and provide insights that ultimately drove revenue as Kiva Sales & Service scales as a market leader.