It's nice to work with a company that feels more like a partnership rather than we're just a customer.
When you’re one of the UK’s most recognisable craft breweries, staying ahead in a competitive market takes more than great beer. It takes a smart, agile, and insight-driven field sales team too.
For Beavertown Brewery, managing a fast-growing field sales operation with spreadsheets and disconnected systems was slowing the team down. Reporting was manual, account visibility was patchy, and making data-led decisions wasn’t easy.
In this case study, we explore how Beavertown transformed their field sales operation; saving hours in admin, centralising reporting, and creating a smarter, faster, more effective sales process with Bowimi’s field sales CRM platform.
We used to give the team a dedicated admin once a month to journey plan, which feels like a long time ago and a bit archaic. Now the team are in the tool before they leave the house every morning. It's freed up resource massively.
Who are Beavertown?
If you’ve ever ordered a craft beer in the UK, chances are you’ve come across a Beavertown brew. Known for their bold flavours and instantly recognisable, comic book-style branding, Beavertown has become one of the country’s most iconic craft breweries since launching in 2011.
Now part of the Heineken family, Beavertown continues to carve out its place in the market, with a mission to bring great beer to more drinkers, in more venues, across the UK. Their range includes fan favourites like Neck Oil, Gamma Ray, and alcohol-free Lazer Crush, and they’ve built an impressive nationwide presence to match.
At the heart of their on-trade growth is a dedicated field sales team, led by National Field Sales Manager Jasmine, who joined the business in 2023 with a background spanning the likes of Heineken, independent breweries and e-commerce.
What problem did they have?
Like many growing drinks brands, Beavertown’s rapid scaling brought new challenges, particularly when it came to sales visibility and operational control in the field.
Before Bowimi, Beavertown didn’t have a centralised system for field sales activity. Account managers were juggling spreadsheets, with little way to track performance, report on customer visits, or manage POS orders effectively.
According to Andy, Beavertown’s Route to Market Director, at one point they had 1500 stockists split across 6 different spreadsheets.
As Jasmine explains: “We were good at inputting activity — but what do you do with that information afterwards? We needed a system that could turn our field data into something useful for the wider business.”
After becoming a part of Heineken, the Beavertown team focused on improving their ability to report back with meaningful, accurate data. The team needed a better way to track account activity, monitor stockists, manage contracts, and log crucial data like price per pint without endless admin.
The Bowimi solution
With the team having a dedicated admin day every month for route planning (“Which feels, you know, a long time ago and a bit archaic,” says Andy), Beavertown went searching for a journey planning tool to make the team more flexible and save them time on admin. Andy discovered Bowimi, and the rest is history.
Those 1500 stockists across 6 spreadsheets were uploaded to our platform, and straight away the team had one centralised system to work from when out in the field. All surveys, location history, route planning and prospecting could now be done in one place.
Beavertown had started using Bowimi before Jasmine joined, but it wasn’t being maximised to its potential. As Jasmine highlights, the input features were fantastic. They were capturing what was in outlet, what was pouring, what they were doing, who the contacts were… But they weren’t doing much in terms of the learnings and output.
Over the last year, working closely with their Bowimi Account Manager Ian and the wider Customer Success team, they’ve evolved the way Bowimi is used across their field sales operation, turning it into a vital part of their daily workflow. Now Beavertown have powerful insights from every survey, order and visit feeding back to support and inform wider business decisions and strategies.
Key features making a difference for Beavertown include:
Field teams can see all their accounts, plan visits efficiently, and track which SKUs are on tap at each site.
This is particularly important for new territories or regions reps don’t know as well, allowing them to be more strategic and see them more holistically.
To find out more about Bowimi’s prospecting and route planning capabilities click here.
Jasmine uses Bowimi’s data output tools to check call frequency, identify gaps, track average price per pint by region, and gather market insights.
No more hunches, the data speaks for itself. When marketing enquires what accounts they should be targeting across the UK, the field sales team can easily filter down to the top 100 accounts from the ROKET surveys, and then with further insights and filtering get even more targeted.
Beavertown pride themselves on being seen, and with such iconic branding it’s a key KPI for their field reps. With a bespoke integration into their POS supplier, the team can place and track orders for tap handles, glassware, and other merch — with full visibility of what’s being sent where.
ROKET Score system: A custom-built scoring system within Bowimi, rating each site from 1-100 based on key criteria like brand visibility, execution standards and staff training.
R – Right brand
O – Out of this world execution
K – Keen on quality
E – Elevated visibility
T – Target activation
This feeds into the field reps’ KPI’s, all clearly visible in one dashboard.
Integrated with Power BI, enabling Beavertown to overlay field data with other sources like Shopify and B2C sales, building a complete picture of market performance.
Moving to an account management model meant it wasn’t just about signing new business, it was about getting the most out of existing customers, too. Bowimi’s flexibility made that possible.
The results
Since 2022 Beavertown have been working with Bowimi, and in that time our two businesses have evolved together. We’re always striving to make our platform as effective as possible for our customers, and with all of Beavertown’s field sales activity supported by Bowimi, we’ve developed several features in our platform.
In just the past 12 months since Jasmine joined the team, Beavertown has seen significant operational gains. The benefits have been tangible:
- Major time savings for account managers, with everything from visit notes to contracts and POS orders handled in one place. In Jasmine’s words, “It’s probably saved half a day a week across the team, as a rule.”
- Less manual reporting, freeing up reps to spend more time in trade and less time in spreadsheets.
- Better business visibility, with real-time data on account performance, stockist numbers and market insights.
- Smarter decision-making, with tools to identify the most valuable accounts and target resources where they’ll have the biggest impact.
Looking forward
Beavertown isn’t slowing down. The team recently renewed their annual agreement with Bowimi and are continuing to evolve how they use the platform, with plans to grow their data connectivity and deepen integrations across the business.
Andy says on our partnership, “I feel like we’ve connected in a really nice way between the two businesses, and there’s a real relationship there.”
“The value for money for the tool is fantastic,” Jasmine summarises, “It’s nice to work with a company that feels more like a partnership rather than we’re just a customer.”
They’ve already recommended Bowimi to other breweries in the industry, including Brixton Brewery, and are optimistic about what’s next.
