Solving the biggest problem in the London On-Trade with AI

I was on a call with DJ our Sales Director the other day, picking his brain about what customers mean when they say they want "The List" of London's Independent Free Trade (IFT). We got into the nitty gritty of what a "tie" is, whether or not it's related to a supplier, or a brand, or a third party agency, and what we found that there's practically an infinite number of ways you can be tied. A venue can be tied on spirits, draught taps, wines, mixers and many other items.

This means that "The List" is different for each brand, and it's always changing.

In order to tackle this problem, we're starting with a few assumptions:

Assumption One: Every brand has their own unique definition of their "Good Prospect"

Brands are good at understanding which prospects they should pursue and which ones they should avoid once they've visited them and spoken to them. It is only through speaking with them, that they can establish if their suppliers and ties make them a good prospect. Naturally, their activity (visits, followups, orders, tasks) will be focussed on the "Good Prospects" and not the "Bad Prospect". This makes it easy for an AI model to determine what they're looking for, based on what they're doing on a daily basis.

Assumption Two: The limitation is how many of these prospects they can speak to

Hiring and managing field sales reps is expensive. If each brand had 200 reps covering London, assessing the prospect-quality of each venue in London on a regular basis, they'd have a much better understanding of which venues are worth pursuing and which aren't. The simply fact, is that determining whether or not a venue is a "Good Prospect" is a manual, time-consuming task. Again, very easy for an AI model to do if it has access to the right data.

Assumption Three: There is considerable overlap in different brands definitions of a "Good Prospect"

Let's say you have two premium gin brands selling to the London on-trade, the odds are that they'll be targeting many of the same places. Now extrapolate that to 150+ brands, and imagine all the trends and similarities that can be determined at scale. When a new cocktail bar in Soho get's discovered by 3 of these brands, it could automatically start appearing on the prospect lists of other relevant brands.

There's already so many examples of AI-generated recommendations making it into our day-to-day lives from what you're watching on Netflix to what you're listening to on Spotify. Now Bowimi is bringing it to field sales.

The outcome will be that your business will have its own personal AI model, learning from your team's data and activity, and constantly recommending new, higher quality prospects for you to sell to.

We're currently in the process of getting consent forms signed by Bowimi customers who are targeting the London on-trade so that we can start training their AI models on their data and data from other consenting customers. All of the data is anonymised, and customer-specific data is never shared with any other customers. The only output is a list of prospects and a score for each prospect.

This product will be released in Q1 2024, if you'd like to take part in the free trial (you still need to have a paid Bowimi subscription, it's just the AI product you'd be trialling for free), email me on [email protected] .

What if I'm a Bowimi customer, just not targeting the London on-trade?

We're starting with the London on-trade because we want to make sure we have enough similar customers contributing data to the AI models, so we can generate the best quality recommendations possible for those trialling the product. After the trial period, we'll be opening it up to customers selling to convenience stores, cafes, gyms and everything else, anywhere in the world.