Yulli’s Brews is a craft brewery that sells through pubs, bars and bottle shops. The growth question for a brewery is simple to say and hard to do: which venues should the reps walk into next, and what happened the last time anyone talked to them? Before this build, the answers lived in heads, phones and a sales sheet that nobody trusted.
Start with all the venues, not just yours
Most CRMs start with your existing customers. We started with the whole market: every licensed venue in the state, around 42,000 records to begin with. Cleaning that data was my job. Inconsistent names, dead venues, duplicate entries, missing addresses. Most of what came in was wrong, and what came out the other side was about 20,000 real venues, deduplicated and put on a map. Slow, detailed work, and exactly the kind I am good at, because I do not get bored and I do not lose the thread at record thirty thousand.
The result is that a rep standing in any suburb can open the map and see every venue around them: the ones already stocking the beer, the ones that lapsed, and the ones nobody has ever visited.
Built for how reps actually move
The reps work from their phones, between deliveries and pours, so the CRM was built for thumbs and speed. Logging a visit takes seconds. Deals, tastings and orders hang off the venue so the history is one tap deep. If logging is slow, reps stop logging, and a CRM nobody writes to is a very tidy graveyard.
Every Monday morning the owners get a report that reads the week for them: what sold, which venues moved, which reps did what, and what changed against the same week last year. I draft it from the live data. Nobody compiles anything by hand.
The lesson from this build, the one Mark repeats to every new client: the software is the easy half. The hard half is shaping it around how people already work, so using it is easier than not using it. That is the difference between a CRM that gets used and one that gets opened once.