Commercial Food Wholesaler Kuze Drives Sales Transformation Through the Implementation of uSonar

Kuze, a food wholesaler that celebrated its 90th anniversary last year, supports the development of the food service industry by leveraging its network of restaurants nationwide. Recently, the company identified the construction of a one-team sales structure as an urgent management priority to adapt to structural changes across the industry. Previously, sales activities and business card management were handled in a siloed, individual manner, with results often concentrated among a few high performers. Consequently, there was a need to improve overall organizational performance by visualizing sales processes and promoting a division of labor across marketing, inside sales, and field sales.
To address these challenges, the DX Promotion team within the Corporate Strategy Division redefined the company's use of kintone—moving beyond a simple "management tool" to a "system that maximizes customer satisfaction and profit." They began building a framework to accurately visualize not only results but also the processes leading to orders, making them reproducible.
To achieve this, it was first necessary to resolve data duplication and obsolescence within the customer database to establish a solid customer data foundation. Furthermore, they envisioned a mechanism to effectively utilize this corporate data to enable sales teams to increase revenue (shortening lead times). Based on these requirements, uSonar was selected because it allows for the consolidation of corporate data within kintone at the branch level (such as individual restaurant locations) and provides access to "LBC," a corporate database with extensive coverage of 12.5 million records nationwide. A key feature of this implementation is its deployment across multiple departments.

1. Sales Department
In the sales department, we utilize uSonar based on the customer data infrastructure maintained by LBC to support both existing sales, which focuses on "deeply understanding our customers," and new business development, which focuses on "proposing solutions based on the customer's business profile."
For existing sales, we can visualize transaction status at the individual store level for chains and group companies, enabling us to approach untapped locations of companies with whom we already have a relationship. Furthermore, by leveraging "cautionary" information and credit scores, we have optimized the allocation of our sales resources.
For new business development, we utilize the corporate information and business card management app "mSonar." In addition to managing information on independently owned restaurants, we can freely search for companies at any time and easily grasp detailed information before meetings. This contributes to more efficient information gathering and the standardization of sales skills.

2. Product and Marketing Departments
In today's digital society, 70% of the purchasing process is completed before a salesperson makes contact, making pre-purchase research and evaluation by the buyer a critical factor in decision-making.
Kuze's product and marketing departments utilize the "Live Access" feature, which visualizes companies visiting our website. By using Live Access, we can visualize in real-time "which companies are viewing which pages on our site," allowing us to build richer customer touchpoints.

3. Other Departments
In other departments, we have unified customer codes that were previously managed separately by the sales department using the LBC code provided by uSonar. This allows for data cleansing and significantly reduces the man-hours required for complex reconciliation tasks.
Additionally, by utilizing "credit score information," we can identify high-risk companies in advance, making credit decisions and transaction approvals much smoother.
Furthermore, for corporate research that was previously conducted by searching the internet individually, we can now view basic company information, financial data, and affiliate information all in one place on uSonar, reducing the effort required for information gathering. As a result, this contributes to the overall efficiency of research and management operations and improves productivity.

With the introduction of uSonar, Kuze is building a company-wide foundation for information utilization that includes not only the sales department but also the product and marketing departments.
Moving forward, in addition to the CRM data from the inside sales department built three years ago, we plan to integrate data from the SFA accumulated by field sales with BI tools. Our policy is to leverage this for more advanced data analysis, AI-driven decision-making, and management support.
Furthermore, we will continue to enhance our risk management and proposal capabilities by making more effective use of cautionary and credit score information based on uSonar's corporate data. We aim to establish a data-driven sales structure centered on corporate data.

Until now, our sales activities were primarily dependent on the intuition and experience of each individual. However, by introducing uSonar, we have been able to establish a foundation for utilizing customer data.
Because we can now utilize corporate data at the branch and group level, we expect to realize more strategic and reproducible sales activities. While cherishing the trust we have built as a company with a long history, we will continue to take on challenges as a company that supports the transformation of the food industry, aiming to grow into a more convenient partner for our customers and all our employees.

Kuze Co., Ltd. is a food wholesale company founded in 1934 that sells commercial food ingredients and materials to the food service industry nationwide.
With the mission of "Connecting thoughts through the power of food," we support the future of food by leveraging our proposal-based sales and product development capabilities.

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