Sofo Foods Brings Its Sales Team Into One Place with Pepper

The Problem: A consultative sales team working in too many places

Sofo Foods began in Toledo, Ohio, in the early 1940s, when Antonio Sofo drove to Detroit for the Italian cheese, salami and pasta Toledo lacked. Today the family-owned distributor serves restaurants and pizzerias from distribution centers in Toledo, OH ; Suwanee, GA; and Houston, TX. It also owns Atlanta produce distributor Athena Farms.

About 45 DSRs, backed by inside account managers and DSMs, carry the customer relationships, and those relationships are the business. Sofo has sold consultatively for 75 years: grow with the customer, see them every week, and make the relationship pay off for both sides. Its sales tools made that harder than it needed to be.

Reps and inside account managers worked across five systems: Pepper, NCR Enterprise, a point-solution order entry tool, a separate mobile ordering app, and a homegrown CRM Sofo had built and rebuilt over 20 years. The CRM sat behind the company firewall, so logging a note meant connecting to a VPN, often from a laptop on the side of the road. Few customers ordered online or in the app, so reps spent visits writing down orders.

Managers felt it too. When a DSM sat down with a DSR, the rep's activity was spread across systems.

"We're looking in too many places," says Nick Baker, Vice President of Sales at Sofo Foods. "It should just be easy. One place."

‍

The Solution: Retire the point tools, sunset the CRM, and make Pepper where the sales team lives

Replacing its point-solution order entry tool was the main reason Sofo moved to Pepper. With Sales Hub, the inside sales team keys orders faster from the desktop, and Sofo shut off the tool's mobile ordering app completely.

Customers moved to Pepper's app and web ordering, and to Pepper chat. A customer's message reaches their inside account manager, DSR and DSM in one thread, so coverage holds when someone is on vacation.

With orders flowing through Pepper, Sofo turned to the CRM. Reps log notes and set reminders from their phones and track prospects by status. NCR already sends Sofo's DSM-to-rep hierarchy into Pepper, so the structure managers need is in place.

The homegrown CRM had served Sofo for 20 years. Keeping it would have meant another app on every phone plus an always-on VPN or zero-trust setup, with the security exposure that comes with it. Retiring it takes that infrastructure off the table. "You guys sort of have it end to end already taken care of," Baker says. "So I don't have to mess with that."

But less infrastructure is only part of the gain. The bigger payoff is usage. “Putting it all in one place just makes it so much more accessible,” he says. “The easier it gets, the more engagement you get on it.”

‍

‍

The Result - Fewer tools, more time selling

More than 60% of Sofo’s customers now place all their own orders through the app or web, and rep visits look different as a result. 

“It’s not, ‘here I am taking the order and having the conversation about one case of pepperoni,’” Baker says. “It’s, well, what else can I get you? What other problems can I help you solve?”. When a customer does order the wrong item, they message the team on shared chat and get it fixed the same day before shipping. Sofo avoids a refused delivery and perishables riding back to the warehouse.

The platform also held up through an ERP consolidation. In July, Sofo moved Athena Farms off Entrée and onto NCR and Pepper in a single-day cutover. Baker had heard horror stories of distributors who couldn’t ship for weeks after an ERP change, but Athena’s orders kept flowing from the first hour. New logins were created, and Athena’s customers didn’t notice.

The next step is annual planning. Sofo sets growth targets each year and updates them quarterly. Starting in the new year, each rep’s prospects, expected first-order dates and notes will sit together in Pepper, so managers can see in one place whether a rep’s pipeline is big enough to hit their growth target.

“Some people need a little push. New people that are coming in, this is all they know, and they’re loving it.”

- Nick Baker, VP of Sales, Sofo Foods

‍