The drinks industry is working through a period of real change. Consumer preferences are shifting, new categories are emerging and the occasions people drink for are evolving. Sales teams are under pressure to find growth, and decisions about where they spend their time carry more weight than they used to.
And if that wasn’t enough, AI has landed and is moving at pace. Many businesses are seeing the opportunities with AI and looking at what they can automate to take off people’s plates. At ForteIS, we’re looking at this from a different, relationship-based angle. Just because something can be automated, does that mean it should be automated?
Journey Planning
Journey planning looks like an obvious job for AI. A Territory Manager might have 160 outlets to cover over a twelve-week cycle, with capacity for eight calls a day. The CRM already holds each customer's location, sales history and call frequency, so AI can group outlets, weigh priorities and produce an efficient plan in seconds.
What the data doesn't show is that the rep has built a way of working with certain customers over years. Those details can change the value of a whole day. AI might find room for a ninth call, but that call only matters if it is the right one and leads to a useful conversation.
We could teach the system more of what salespeople know by asking them to record it, but that has its own cost. If AI saves a rep ten minutes of planning and then asks for ten minutes of extra data entry, is their job easier? The bigger gain can come from making smarter use of the call notes, order history and customer preferences teams already capture.
AI should advise and salespeople should decide
The balance changes when AI recommends and supports rather than decides. A rep could start the week by asking the CRM where tomorrow's eight calls are best spent. The system does the analysis and suggests a list, and the rep adjusts it with what they know. Over time, the system can learn from those corrections too.
This shapes how we decide what to build. "Make my job easier" is too broad a brief. The more useful questions are what would help a salesperson walk into better-targeted accounts, with a better-prepared conversation, which admin can safely go, and which parts of the job should stay human. For our team and our clients who use RhinoCRM, the customer relationship always sits front of mind, and every AI feature we consider is judged on whether it gives salespeople more time and better information for those conversations to add real value.
To talk about how RhinoCRM and considered, strategic AI and automation could work in your business, get in touch with the team at ForteIS.
ForteIS is a Gold Partner of the Drinks Association.