A cocktail of success: How Trendskout helps Craftails scale

What do the Pornstar Martini and Trendskout have in common? Both provide a refreshing experience - one behind the bar, the other behind the scenes at Craftails. Craftails, founded to provide world-class ready-to-serve cocktails and mocktails, focuses entirely on on-trade partners in Belgium and the Netherlands. Their range, which includes products that can be served immediately, makes it easier for hospitality businesses to offer high-quality drinks quickly. "We really want to create something that boosts our customers' business," explains Carl, co-founder of Craftails.

Top 5 customers per sales

So visits can be planned smoothly

Using data for better customer visits

This allows their sales to be more proactive

Rapid growth put pressure on their model

With Trendskout, they have an additional sales colleague

The problem

This strategy has given Craftails a rapidly growing client base, but this growth also brought challenges. To start using data more wisely and optimise operations and sales, Craftails sees in Trendskout the ideal partner who will help make this possible.

Increasing demand and rapid growth made it increasingly difficult for the sales team to prepare properly for customer visits. Carl explains: "Our ambassadors are on the road all the time and have little time to prepare for their visits." This created the need for a solution that would help them access real-time customer insights quickly and easily.

The solution

Although Craftails has only been using Trendskout for a short time, the initial introduction offers some insight into the system's potential. Craftails was looking for a solution that would help their salespeople access customer information quickly and efficiently, and Trendskout offers a combination of customer management and inventory optimisation that seems to be a good fit. Carl describes first impressions as follows: "For us, Trendskout is the ideal co-pilot. It gives us information we didn't always specifically consider before." We always keep looking for how to make things more efficient, and this perfectly matched our growing needs."

Having recently integrated Trendskout, it complements the daily operations of our sales team. Every Monday, salespeople receive an automated update with an overview of their top five customers, based on order trends and stock forecasts. These insights enable them to plan visits in a targeted way and give specific attention to customers who can benefit most from a visit. Carl explains, "Now we can just look in Trendskout before stepping in and get the most out of a customer visit. Take a customer where orders are a bit behind. If, when we visit, we notice that there is no cocktail menu on the table then, that is of course a significant improvement that we can recommend to our customer." By proactively using this data, we expect that visits can become more productive and strengthen customer relationships even more.

The data that can be used for this goes particularly wide. "What will the weather conditions be? Should our customers prepare for a busy period and consequently make sure their stock is ample? Cocktails that prove popular in a certain type of catering establishment, which in turn creates cross-selling opportunities. And so on". This is also where our operations team will be able to extract a lot of valuable information for the production of our cocktails and mocktails.

What Craftails particularly appreciates is the close cooperation with the Trendskout team, which is constantly working to tailor their system to Craftails' specific needs. Carl especially praises the team's responsiveness and flexibility: "Communication is super easy. There's nothing better than being able to call and have someone on the line right away. That makes it so accessible and shows the human factor that Trendskout keeps in it." He adds, smiling, "All thumbs up for Layla, among others!"

"With Trendskout, we discover opportunities that would otherwise go untapped"

Carl Van Droogenbreuck, co-founder

The result

Results and future

Although Craftails is still at the beginning of working with Trendskout, the sales team is already noticing an improvement during the preparation of customer visits. "It makes everything accessible and lets us see where the biggest opportunities lie," says Carl. Craftails sees Trendskout as a strategic partner that will continue to support them in their growth. The partnership will deepen further in the future, with the aim of extracting even more value from customer data and further optimising customer relationships so that Craftails can continue to grow efficiently and scalably in the long term.