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 elevate performance across the entire organization by visualizing sales processes and promoting the division of labor among marketing, inside sales, and field sales teams.
To address these challenges, the Management Strategy Promotion Office's DX Promotion team redefined the company's existing kintone platform not just as a "management tool," but as a "system to maximize 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 in kintone at the individual location level (such as for restaurants) and because of the high coverage of the "LBC" corporate database, which contains 12.5 million records nationwide. A key feature of this project 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 foster richer customer engagement.

3. Other Departments
In other departments, we have unified customer codes that were previously managed separately by the sales department using the LBC codes provided by uSonar. This allows for data cleansing and significantly reduces the man-hours required for cumbersome 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, tasks that previously required individual internet searches for corporate research can now be streamlined, as uSonar allows us to view everything from basic corporate information to financial and affiliate data in one place. As a result, this contributes to the overall efficiency of research and management operations and improves productivity.

With the introduction of uSonar, Kuze is advancing the creation of a company-wide information utilization infrastructure 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.

Previously, our sales activities were primarily reliant 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 to grow into a company that is more convenient for both our customers and our employees, supporting the transformation of the food industry.

Founded in 1934, Kuze Co., Ltd. is a food wholesale company 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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