Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits is in search of modern solutions to get ahead, and people fall into the domain of David Chaplin, the corporate’s chief growth officer.
More B2B sellers are re-inventing how they do business to satisfy the needs of more digitally driven business buyers. Family-owned Southern Glazer’s is one place where this is occurring. The distributor is out to achieve market share. It desires to achieve this by enhancing its collaboration with buyers and trading partners through digital and offline channels.
It took a big step in that direction in 2023 by announcing several appointments to key positions. Those include vice presidents in ecommerce and omnichannel development, customer and supplier relations, and national retail sales.
Now, Southern Glazer’s has a brand new enterprise-wide initiative called 2030 Vision. The initiative goals to remodel how the distribution company does business offline — and online.
Digital commerce and recent digital technology play crucial roles in Southern Glazer’s recent initiative. On this question-and-answer session, Digital Commerce 360 sits down with Chaplin. He updates us on the progress to this point with its digital transformation, together with the opportunities and challenges ahead.
Interview with Southern Glazer’s David Chaplin
Digital Commerce 360: What’s 2030 Vision, and what role does digital commerce and transformation play in it?
David Chaplin, chief growth officer, Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits
David Chaplin: Our 2030 vision is to be the hospitality industry’s most valued selling, logistics, and insights provider. Digital plays a big role in equipping our employees, suppliers, and customers with the world’s best digital capabilities, tools, and data. Specifically, our focus within the short term is directly tied to driving business success out there.
DC360: You’re making a sizeable investment in digital transformation. What are the particular goals and objectives Southern Glazer’s seeks to realize? Please be specific.
Chaplin: Our investments in digital ladder as much as our 2030 vision “to be the hospitality industry’s most valued selling, logistics, and insights provider.” For instance, the team will construct on the success of Proof Commerce by continuing to boost its capabilities and features and has invested in a brand new Enterprise Data Center of Excellence to leverage the ability of knowledge, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI). We are actually taking a look at data as certainly one of our products, bringing insights to life and driving higher outcomes for our teams and trading partners.
Digital sales at Southern Glazer’s
DC360: What are you projecting digital sales across all channels to in 2025 vs. 2024? How will you achieve this growth?
Chaplin: As a privately held company, we don’t disclose specific financial information or forecasts. Our objective is to realize growth is on enhancing digitally influenced sales, meaning we don’t have a preference where the transaction occurs (either online or offline). Nevertheless, we would like to make sure that our sales force and our customers are utilizing our best-in-class digital capabilities and insights to assist them succeed out there. What we are able to say is that we see evidence that it’s working for our customers and sales consultants — those using our digital tools are seeing growth, even in an otherwise tough 12 months for the industry.
DC360: What initiatives are planned or underway to enhance Southern Glazer’s digital user experience for omnichannel B2B buyers?
Chaplin: Our focus is on making Proof Commerce the best platform that our customers use to order or run their business, across any industry. Personalization is a serious priority for Proof Commerce to enable that. And providing a simplified, tailored experience to our customers is the goal. This personalization can be powered by AI/ML technology.
Southern Glazer’s use of AI
DC360: Are you able to cite some examples of the way you incorporate artificial intelligence into your digital commerce initiatives?
Chaplin: We’re also incorporating AI and Gen AI into our existing tool sets to easily give the experience to our users. As a part of the brand new enterprise data center of excellence (COE), we have now hired a dedicated head of knowledge science, AI and machine learning as well.
DC360: You’re constructing a greater than 350-member digital team, which is a giant expansion. Where are you expanding and hiring?
Chaplin: The roles we’re adding are primarily in product, engineering, design, data science and architecture.
DC360: What are your biggest digital challenges and the way are you overcoming them?
Chaplin: The largest change is the agility of getting a “progress over perfection” approach. Specifically, we are actually working together in a resolute product and platform model where digital and data technology (IT) are one team constructing, delivering, piloting, iterating and scaling technology at a much faster pace than ever before. We’re confident this recent way of working will further speed up our digital progress, and can provide significant advantages to our employees, suppliers and customers.
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