Client: Blackbird Vineyards

Award-winning Napa Valley Vineyard blends Echo Lane’s best practices and Boomi’s Cloud Integration Solution to harvest the true power of salesforce.com

Napa Valley’s Blackbird Vineyards began operations in 2003 and produces artisanal, handcrafted, Pomerol-inspired wines which have garnered numerous accolades, including the recent Robb Report “100 Perfect Pours” in 2009. The vineyard also owns and operates Ma(i)sonry Napa Valley—“a life aesthetic”— which hosts a collective of ten boutique winemakers, along with a rotating collective of craftsmen, artists, and designers, in a gallery setting.

Providing a high quality Customer Experience is paramount in our industry. Every bottle of our wine and corresponding customer interaction must produce a brand experience that creates loyalty. We chose Echo Lane for this project because they are focused on providing a top notch client services as well as understanding the operational intricacies of the premium wine business. They know how to maximize the benefits of salesforce.com and they work with top-line integration specialists like Boomi. Echo-Lane is a great partner and Blackbird Vineyards is pleased to optimize their expertise.

- Paul Leary
Blackbird Vineyards
Ma(i)sonry Napa Valley

Challenge

Blackbird Vineyards has used salesforce.com for its CRM, Microsoft RMS as a point of sale system at Ma(i)sonry’s tasting gallery and Ewinery Solutions’ WebLink as an ecommerce system on the vineyard’s website, www.blackbirdvineyards.com. With its business growing, Blackbird Vineyards management had to track sales through all three systems making it difficult to get a clear unified picture of product sales. In addition, Blackbird wanted to differentiate sales across its brands – Blackbird wine sales via the website, and Point of Sale purchases at its tasting gallery—Ma(i)sonry, as well as collective winery partner sales and on-site art and design sales at Ma(i)sonry. Without an integrated solution, this took hours of manual work to combine the data from these disparate systems.
The Blackbird team is focused on their expertise—crafting, marketing and selling premium wine and did not have the luxury to hire in-house expertise to support all of their technology needs. What was required was a well-planned integration, salesforce.com restructuring, and a team that could understand both the technology and the wine business. In addition, there was a time to market reality for the project to literally be ready “before the harvest.”

Solution

Echo Lane, with its focus on understanding specific customer needs and then delivering fast, high ROI solutions for its customers, performed a comprehensive review of Blackbird’s business and its current Salesforce.com implementation. After the review, Echo Lane came up with these specific recommendations:

  • Improve the user experience by reducing the number of Account, Lead, and Contact Record Types
  • Automate the manual hand-offs by creating Lead workflow rules to transfer Record Types across objects upon Lead Conversion
  • Integrate multiple data points into a seamless environment by using Boomi AtomSphere – a cloud integration solution

Paul Leary, president of Blackbird Vineyards, sums up his experience with Echo Lane, "This was a strategic project to assist in optimizing our CRM visibility into all sales channels for the company brands. To complete the integration, we required a salesforce.com specialist, a Boomi expert, and a wine industry/consumer packaged goods expert, that would bring best practices to the project. Echo Lane is that company

Results

Echo Lane, Boomi and eWinery Solutions worked together to perform the necessary data mapping and cleanup between WebLink, RMS and salesforce.com and rolled out a complete integration solution in four weeks.

Describing Echo Lane’s approach to project consulting and management, Principal Founder Alana Kaselitz stresses, “Innovation is the key to helping our customers find fast, cost-effective solutions. We know that the force.com platform and integration specialists like Boomi bring those benefits and results to our customers.”

Blackbird Vineyards Project Outcomes:

  • Blackbird ecommerce, brick and mortar and wholesale sales are now tracked in all three systems
  • All sales are now reported in salesforce.com, with differentiation across brands and time stamping now provided
  • Blackbird can now market more effectively to their customers by leveraging order history and have a true 360 degree view of their customer
  • Integration among three systems built, tested, and rolled out within four weeks

Technology used

  • Salesforce.com
  • Boomi AtomSphere integration engine
  • Force.com data migration tools
  • Microsoft RMS
  • eWinery Solutions