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How to Employ AI Without Sacrificing Your Winery or Distillery's Humanity
The fear of alienating one’s customers is warranted, considering AI-suggested ad copy tends to feel like a supermarket birthday cake: the tepid intersection of everyone’s tastes, perfectly inoffensive and underwhelming, pleasant but forgettable. In Wine & Spirits especially, it’s tempting to treat AI’s role in our marketing output like a zero sum game: a choice between efficiency or meaning, novelty or tradition, quantity or quality, transaction or connection.
Fortunately—with the right approach—it’s actually not all that difficult to retain one’s soul despite dramatically improving one’s productivity in any role. While this does sound like something Chat GPT would write (looking at you, em dashes)—well, there’s nothing I can say to convince you I’m human right now, is there? On second thought, maybe it’s best to just read on.
It’s Worth It.
Used judiciously, AI is the great equalizer. Where small businesses truly had little hope of accomplishing as much as larger teams before, a resourceful startup can now run circles around inefficient, bureaucratic, do-everything-by-committee corporations.
It’s tempting as an up-and-coming wine or spirits brand to feel hopelessly outgunned by the old guard in terms of the resources they’re able to muster (like the distributor’s attention, for starters). In our daydreams of success, we tend to mythologize and even emulate those at the top. Ask an actual employee at one of the largest suppliers how they deploy their giant budgets so carefully, and they may have trouble stifling their laughter.
Robots Hate This Simple Trick
...Read the full article here
How to Sell All of Your Wine or Spirits – by Ignoring Most of Your Account Universe
80% of Your (Unsold) Accounts Don’t Matter – So Stop Calling on Them
Don’t worry; we’re not going to write another article arguing that the majority of your sales volume comes from the top handful of your accounts; we’re not sure we could even locate that poor horse’s cadaver at this point. We’re more interested in the practical implications of the 80/20 rule: the “So what?” part of this equation – how do we use this knowledge to sell more wine & spirits?
Sales Resources are Limited; Limit Account Targets Accordingly
For any hope of success selling all of your inventory, you must first acknowledge the salesperson’s scarcest asset: time.
Novice sales teams take a shotgun approach with the goal to win as many placements in as many accounts as possible. This sounds logical in the abstract, and would work great if it resulted in high volume; instead, unfocused activity generates a lot of one-off (time consuming!) sales that don’t stick.
Many well-intentioned teams spend their time touching high numbers of accounts because it feels productive. Any self-aware salesperson knows that it’s easier to defend oneself in a “Did you do anything this week?” meeting with a ton of activity to show for their paycheck. Maximum sales activity looks impressive in the short term, but leads to failure in the long term. Why?
Jumping from prospect to prospect and racking up numbers leaves little time to research and intimately understand your buyer’s needs. The result is a bunch of unhappy customers: more placements with higher churn, a disconnect with your end consumer, and an overall shallow impact in the market.
Sales teams who fail to devote their limited attention to a clearly defined target list of accounts ultimately fail to deliver the desired result: an empty warehouse and a bunch of revenue. So how do you avoid the trap of activity obsession and accept instead the counterintuitive constraints of the Pareto principle to grow your business?
Identify Your Target Accounts
If you want to sell a lot of wine & spirits through traditional channels, you’ll need to create (and dynamically narrow down) a key account target list – really, a few lists broken down by premise (on/off), by market. You’ll need to think more like a sniper.
Coming up with this list is one thing – and hard work, at that – but actually sticking to those account targets with any real discipline is another rarity altogether. Out of the few suppliers that do decide to research and target a narrow subset of accounts, fewer still succeed in directing their sales team’s time and energy into only the pursuit of meaningful relationships within those accounts.
Until recently, beverage brands have been reliant on whatever account information they can dig up through various means of research online, in-person scouting, subscriptions like Nation's Restaurant News, GAYOT, Eater or Zagat, and whatever limited visibility their distributor offers through data brokers. Fortunately, alternative lines of communication between supplier and distributor are being opened, allowing for more granular account attributes to be shared, including qualifiers like whether there’s a cold box or grab & go options at checkout, POS info, percent of shelf, etc.. – saving valuable time by providing a narrower list to begin with.
Gain Visibility Into Key Accounts
In addition to serving, empowering, and protecting one’s team – a sales leader’s primary function is that of analyst, identifying promotions worth repeating (or retiring) and providing the beta (to use a climbing term) their team needs to win in key accounts.
While depletions and retail account data (RAD) provide some visibility into what’s actually happening in key accounts, they’re really just lagging indicators of success: a view into the past. The best CRM tools are able to integrate an automated depletion feed and use business intelligence tools like GoodData to report that data side by side with sales activity at the account level to determine which among those activities is actually responsible for the greatest lift in sales volume. If, for instance, you tend to see a lift in sales everywhere that you land a by-the-glass or cocktail menu placement, identifying gaps – accounts where you don’t yet have those placements – gives you the strategic oversight to deploy your sales reps’ time to maximum effect.
This practice of identifying leading indicators of success – incentivizing activities that have a proven track record of driving volume – is the secret sauce that alchemizes our teams’ efforts into revenue.
Execute in Lockstep With Your Distributor Partners
Given today’s unworkable bottleneck – i.e., too many suppliers and far too few distributors – and yesterday’s long-obsolete strategies – e.g., trying to manage the distributor in hopes that they’ll magically grow their capacity – suppliers must turn instead to new competitive advantages and iconoclastic solutions.
Here’s where key account target lists and timely data come together. Not only is it easier and faster than ever for suppliers to gain unprecedented visibility at the account level by seeing what the distributor sees, but contemporary tools like BevPath have also made it possible for suppliers to work in lockstep with their distributor partners, coordinating their sales teams to execute against agreed-upon targets and measure the outcomes.
In the thick of the pandemic, we quietly rolled out an innovation enabling our supplier partners to send KPIs to their distributors in the form of survey questions for the distributor reps to execute against at the account level, reporting the results back. We’ve turned what has lately become a one-way street – outdated distributor-generated reports pushed to the supplier at regular intervals – back into the two-way partnership that the supplier<>distributor handshake was always intended to signify.
Strategy Eats Hope for Breakfast
Fancy digital solutions make things a whole heck of a lot easier, but in the end, no matter what tool fits your budget, the basic principle remains the same; tracking, refining, and ultimately optimizing your presence in a few carefully selected accounts – to the neglect of every shiny new toy that enters your team’s periphery – is the path to prosperity for beverage alcohol suppliers in this hyper-competitive market. You have to know your customer, understand why you’re a part of their lifestyle, and meet them where they are, just the way they prefer you.
Niche AI Applications for Wine & Spirits
With wineries practically betrothed to spreadsheets, early-2000s websites, and stodgy cursive fonts plucked straight from a Jane Austen character’s trembling hands, is it any surprise that our industry is behind in adopting useful AI tools with the capacity to make our businesses efficient and profitable?
Despite all appearances to the contrary, given that first paragraph – this isn’t another post trying to shame the industry into adapting. A well-connected bev alc professional need only scroll LinkedIn for about two seconds for a hearty dose of “stop complaining; this is your fault” novellas on the state of alcohol sales today.
No; the intent here is to empower you: to suggest that the AI tools available to us right now are not only developed enough, but so easily adoptable that taking action today might just be enough to usher you and your team into a sound night’s sleep for the first time since, perhaps, “the before times” pre-pandemic.
It would be foolish to keep operating the same way we did half a century ago. Adept as we are at agonizing over our own mortality, we somehow fail to apply the same existential urgency to our business practices in a world that changes very, very quickly.
Is it any surprise automation has failed to resonate with winemakers and distillers, careful stewards of ancient arts?
In Wine & Spirits, it makes sense that we struggle to relinquish control to artificial intelligence on the business end; so much of our focus in production is on uncompromising perfection, resisting anything that might threaten to dilute our creative vision.
Successful marketing practice, on the other hand, often entails split testing (A/B testing) multiple variations of creative, treating our own ideas as entirely disposable and entrusting the promotion of our precious products (read: our babies) to the publishing equivalent of a pump-action shotgun in the algorithm’s hands.
Hesitation Warranted; Help Wanted
Admittedly, AI’s usefulness is still very much emerging; there’s merit to questioning whether or not Chat GPT’s tenth-grade-essay bravado is really enough to strike deep resonance with your ideal customers.
On one side of the fence, certain hiring managers/recruiters take a “burn the fleet and never look back” approach to AI, rejecting every applicant who doesn’t seem to bow down and worship emerging technology as the only way forward.
Then, there are the experienced applicants, with an acute awareness of AI’s shortcomings in the shadow of their own skill set, keeping a close eye on new tools as potential competitors on one hand and a competitive advantage on the other.
The answer is to wield these tools judiciously; to stay up to date and agile, open to potential benefits without gulping down the panacea pill with both eyes shut.
So what’s the practical application here? How are wineries and distilleries already using AI tools to conduct business more efficiently and eliminate costly manual processes?
Chat GPT (and Comparable Generative AI Tools)
Let’s begin with the tool(s) most familiar to the masses. Without getting tangled in the weeds of every possibility out there, have a look at some practical and immediately accessible ways to apply Chat GPT and any image generator (dealer’s choice) to the work your team is already doing to grow your wine and/or spirits business today:
- Brainstorming Campaign Ideas – Now, this one assumes you are, in fact, running any campaigns at all promoting your business. This is one area where Chat GPT, with all of its copywriting shortcomings, really shines: brainstorming ideas for your team to take and develop further. Need a list of 50 lead magnet ideas? Choose your top 3-5 favorites and develop those into full blown pieces of content. Use your audience’s hopes and fears as a guide; which one of these AI-generated ideas is most likely to help my customer get what they want and become the person they want to be? How is it going to enrich their lives and lead to self-actualization? This is the part your AI colleague is going to need help with — empathy.
- Copywriting (to be refined by your team) – AI can provide a great springboard, or starting point for your email campaigns, ad copy, labels, product and collection descriptions for your website. With paid/premium versions of these tools, you can (and should) actually create a persona out of your little AI co-writer; give the tool a brief on who they are (as a stand-in employee) and feed it as many materials as you can on your brand; then, when it’s time for it to crank out an email campaign selling organic Chilean wines from your estate, it has an idea of what brand voice to use and which lines to color inside.
- Marketing images – Need an image for a blog post or LinkedIn article? A photo of a cocktail recipe you came up with, but haven’t actually — ever — made? It’s incredibly easy to save time normally spent searching for the right stock photo or creating (or paying an agency to create) an original piece of content. While this isn’t recommended for everyone, when used sparingly and with some discernment, AI generated images make it possible to bypass many of the time consuming and expensive processes involved in promoting a sale, releasing a new product, and generally supporting all of your marketing efforts from your webstore to social media and email campaigns.
- Promotional videos – this can be especially useful in a B2B context, when your value proposition requires more in-depth explanation to an educated, niche audience. Explainer videos and product releases come to life using stock video libraries and AI voice narration with a quick script.
- Identifying Trends in Complex Data – Feed Chat GPT your depletion data or a spreadsheet and ask it identify patterns, callout highlights, and provide insights or areas for improvement. These tools are alarmingly good at extrapolating insights from massive bodies of data and summarizing those at a speed we could never hope to achieve ourselves. It’s like having an unpaid (yet somehow happy) analyst on your team! It gets better over time the more it learns what you care about and what you’re looking for.
- Ninja Meeting Prep and Communications – if you use an AI notetaker like Fathom, which not only recaps and summarizes everything that transpired, but also breaks down and organizes the content into agendas, follow up and frameworks like BANT —consider feeding these meeting summaries into Chat GPT and asking for high level, simple/digestible/concise communications for your next QBR or presentation.
Most people are aware of these universal AI applications; it’s the niche, industry-specific solutions that aren’t yet on everyone’s radar that we’re here to highlight today.
Automated Distributor Billback/Invoice Management
Few in our industry know it, but the days of manual invoice entry and billback management are over. Using tools like Tradeparency’s AI Invoice Manager, wine & spirits suppliers are able to automatically match any incoming invoices to the deals in their system and catch any discrepancies to save money over time on billback errors.
This frees your team members’ time to use their talents elsewhere, where you really need humans; they’ll be happier, freed from hours of drudgery, and your bottom line will benefit from their highly motivated, inspired new life actually using their rare and valuable skills.
Maps & Route Planning
Beverage alcohol sales teams going door to door can also use AI-driven maps and route planning tools like Salesforce Maps or Lilypad to determine the most efficient way to use their time over the course of a week, given their goals.
Using logic like “show me all the accounts where I have an open objective and haven’t opened a new point of distribution in the last 12 months,” these tools can automatically plan out the most efficient route covering the highest priority accounts generated by users or dictated from the top-down.
Image Recognition
When a sales rep does make an account visit, simply snapping a photo of the backbar or shelf space at a package store location can help piece together what’s actually happening with your product(s) at the account level.
Rather than stand around asking “what part of the shelf am I on?”, AI-driven image recognition solutions enable reps to move on with their day. By analyzing all the images your reps collect in the field, image recognition does the heavy lifting with identifying your SKUs and drawing out actionable insights and suggested follow up in the accounts where you’re not on the shelf or accounts are not compliant with your trade promotions.
Automated Planograms
AI planogram builders are making it easier than ever to save tremendous time and bandwidth optimizing shelf space using historical data. These tools ensure that you are fundamentally positioned to sell more – that your product is at the right place at the right time, at the right price.
From a sales perspective, if you see that you have 2/10 facings on the shelf (20%), but your products represent 60% of the total dollars sold, that gives your team the leverage to approach the retailer for more shelf space. Using AI to draw insights from the shelf (and inform future relays) allows your brand to be as strategic, efficient, and profitable as possible off premise.
by Sarah Nagle
3 Indicators of High Volume in Off-Premise Accounts
It’s hard, in any business, to choose strategies that promote long term growth and longevity while struggling to keep the lights on and make payroll every month. Under thinly veiled panic, we have a tendency to push our sales teams to treat our buyers as means to an end when cash is tight. Overvaluing vanity metrics like off-premise accounts sold, we scrounge for quick, small wins and placements that result in high churn and ultimately lead us right back to square one.
While we may accept – somewhere in the distant, tightly compartmentalized, “rational part” of our brain – that not all accounts are equal and that the vast majority of volume is driven by the top ten or twenty percent of our customers, we go on behaving this way nonetheless, because action feels better than a sales cycle rivaling the Great Wall of China lengthwise.
The good news for wineries & distilleries willing to be more strategic with their sales resources is that it’s not only possible, but well within one’s power to sell all of the wine & spirits one makes by winning placements with just a handful – in some cases, one or two – of the right retailers.
With so much positive feedback to part one in this series, 3 Indicators of High Volume in On-Premise Accounts, we’ve returned to deliver the criteria and common characteristics that define the off-premise accounts driving the most volume today, and how to find them.
Two Methods for Building Key Account Target Lists
What tools does a sales leader have at their disposal for building a well-researched key account target list in 2025?
Many are not yet aware that this first option exists. It’s now possible for any brand to connect directly with their distributor’s database for near real-time access to their brand-specific sold and unsold account universe. With direct visibility into specific account rankings and attributes like whether or not unsold account x has a cold box or counter positioning available at checkout for shooters/small format displays, beverage brands are already wielding this information to determine which accounts are (not) worth calling on in the first place.
The second method, manual research (usually online), is significantly more time consuming but no less critical for success in the market. Search engines and review sites like Yelp really brought this onto the scene, and it has since gotten easier without ever straying far from Google reviews. This method is so effective, in fact, that it’s possible to make a living full-time putting together and selling custom key account lists to large sales teams in the wine & spirits industry.
Do your customers shop there? Will your placement stick?
What really differentiates one package store from another? What are we really asking when we decide whether or not to include a retailer on our brand’s key account list?
The main determinant of success for your brand in any retailer is whether or not your customers shop there. It feels silly to “say out loud,” but it’s comically easy to lose sight of this. We see other brands having success at, say, Costco, and think “if I could only get a meeting with their buyer, we’d be set for life!” That may be true, but only if your customers routinely shop at Costco.
The same type of person looking for a great deal on some “pretty dang good wine” for a white elephant party might not necessarily appreciate the premium price commanded by the number of hands that touched your limited-production, esoteric varietal from harvest to bottle.
Understanding your brand and customers helps you determine which type of off-premise account best suits their needs.
Asking your team to spend all their time calling on boutique bottle shops sounds like a great way to get fired from your new gig as National Sales Manager at Four Loco.
The winning strategy for your brand might look completely different from market to market as state law allows, of course. Most people instinctively understand all of the above, but it’s worth formalizing here as a cautionary preface; pressure from the top-down to hit sales activity goals can quickly dilute even the most highly targeted sales team’s efforts.
It won’t do to simply search the “ten best liquor stores in Denver” and call it a day, but it can be a good starting point. Just use 1) fit for your brand and ideal customer persona and 2) the remaining criteria in this article to narrow your selections down.
1. A Strong Online Presence
If a package store is making an effort to generate demand online for the products they carry, you can bet that this attention to detail carries over into every area of their business:
- Has a bunch of followers and/or positive reviews on social media
- Regularly updates their instagram (or whatever channel their followers prefer) with the latest products they carry, exciting new releases, events, tastings
- A website that doesn’t look downright geriatric, lists their hours, location(s)
- Ecommerce – delivery and/or store pickup (or the ability to at least view the products the store carries)
The quickest way to tell what kind of customer experience an off-premise account offers is to search for them online – to feel out their virtual storefront. It’s a miracle, really – having even a basic, positive presence online automatically puts any package store leagues ahead of their competitors. Up-to-date websites are a staggering rarity, even in 2025.
The same way many successful wine & spirits brands link to a store locator on their website, a package store that reciprocates with visibility to your products on their website has the highest chance of catching your customers’ attention. It’s incredibly easy to drive traffic to your retail partner’s physical locations when all you need is your product’s landing page url from their site and a geotargeted, one-off email campaign to your loyal subscribers.
2. A Loyalty Program
Another way package stores – chains & independents alike – generate repeat business is to offer a convenient and rewarding loyalty program for their customers.
Stores that invite their customers to become subscribers and market to them with special offers and a competitive rewards system know that the biggest driver of revenue for any business is customer retention. If your customers love the experience your retail partner provides. Chances are far higher that when the time comes to shop your category, your inventory is less likely to gather dust awaiting random, one-off foot traffic.
3. They Offer Wine & Spirits Direct Deals
Wine & Spirits brands who are privy to this seldom acknowledged corner of our industry have the potential to trade their struggling startup woes for fast-scaling production headaches trying to keep up with demand overnight.
The regional and national chains driving wine & spirits direct deals drive so much volume on their wine & spirits direct brands in particular because they can enjoy such high margins on the products they sell this way.
This means that if Bentley’s Bourbon Cream agrees to sell exclusively through (in this case, fictional) spirits direct retailer, The Chapped Flask, in the state of Texas, The Chapped Flask’s store associates are going to hound their customers with recommendations for Bently’s and light up those shelf-placements like Christmas trees with shelf talkers, stacks, and everything short of illegal fireworks.
The tradeoff is that some of these placements can be relatively difficult to land. Which requires tenacity over a longer sales cycle akin to most national accounts.
Follow Up is Key
What indicators of high volume did we leave out? Let us know in the comments. If a retailer is a good fit for you customers and has their ducks in a row online and in store, maybe even multiple locations – your efforts are far better directed in large part to that account (and accounts like it).
Simply landing a placement is not enough, though – you’ll need to service that account to build a relationship with your buyer upon dependability and trust, preventing out of stocks and doing your part to generate your own demand to pull your product through and off their shelves.
by Sarah Nagle
How to Sell Alcohol in Sobering Times
With no and low-alcohol categories on the rise and the sober-curious boogeyman around every corner, we needn’t wait for rock bottom to take a hard look at our sales strategy and make a change today.
While much of the wine & spirits industry points the finger at Gen Z & Millennials, the World Health Organization or the Surgeon General, the truth is there’s only one entity responsible for the trajectory of our revenue.
According to Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin in Extreme Ownership, when “problems feel overwhelming and insurmountable . . . it’s our human nature to shift blame, find excuses, and avoid consequences. But taking ownership over what went wrong and accepting the reality of the situation gives you complete control over how you can solve these challenges.”
Trying to sell alcohol in 2025 is tough. Plain and simple, no way around it. With that acknowledged, let’s explore what we can do about it.
A Sign of the Times
If there was one take-away from the recent WSWA Access Live convention, it was that traditional wine & spirits sales are down, and non-traditional and non-alcoholic beverages are here to stay. The convention’s “Opening General Session: A State of the Alcohol Industry” featured Winemaker and Doctor Laura Catena who spoke on the recent U.S. dietary guidelines on alcohol consumption, concluding that we should drink higher quality beverages, and less often. She was followed by Danny Brager and Dale Stratton of SipSource who pointed to plummeting sales, and a failure of on-premise sales to bounce back to post pandemic levels, concluding that we as an industry need to shift with changing demands.
The buzz around non-alc and non-traditional beverages was on display at sessions like “More than a Trend: How Non-Alcoholic Wine & Spirits are Reshaping the Market” with speaker Stephanie Honig, and the “No & Low Mixology Workshop”. Those events drew crowds, but they paled in comparison to the boisterous gathering of the “Hemp Beverage Meet & Greet” presented by the Hemp Beverage Alliance. Granted, the location of the event being Denver, Colorado might have contributed to the popularity of the hemp beverage presence at the show.
In her session, Stephanie Honig, a member of the Honig winemaking family and founder of no-alcoholic wine brand Missing Thorn, said that her target audience is not solely sober or pregnant people, but that it is primarily made up of alcohol consumers who are looking to cut back for a multitude of reasons. She cited the aging “boomer” population that might be cutting back for health reasons, while the younger “Gen Z” generation are choosing to drink less alcohol in general.
A Fruitless Battlefield
Skimming wine & spirits headlines, one gets the impression that the widely-regarded antidote to an increasingly sober society rests on our ability to change consumer perception: to prove “alcohol’s not so bad for you after all; it might even help you live longer!” so that young people change their minds and imbibe more frequently.
If we could just get a modern Edward Bernays to make drinking cool again, these writers seem to think, then every tech bro and YouTuber would be out to liquid lunch again like some ramen-haired Don Draper. At last, we could get back to arguing about our favorite topics instead, like whether gruyère or butterkäse pairs better with a nice grüner veltliner.
In the opening paragraphs of Breakthrough Advertising, copywriting giant Eugene M. Schwartz offers a different take on the matter:
“Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears, and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already-existing desires onto a particular product. This is the copy writer’s task: not to create this mass desire—but to channel and direct it.
Actually, it would be impossible for any one advertiser to spend enough money to actually create this mass desire. He can only exploit it. And he dies when he tries to run against it.”
It’s up to every beverage brand to figure out why people who do drink should drink their product in particular, rather than attempting to change their lapsed customers’ beliefs and behaviors with an already strained marketing budget.
Selling is Listening.
The nice thing about the fundamentals, or basic principles of sales & marketing is that they never change. Wildfires? Tariffs? War? Global Pandemic? To an accomplished brand strategist and copywriter, these are just another lens offering audience insights.
What mass desire or need does your product satisfy? Why is your brand the best at helping your ideal customer get what they want and become their actualized, ideal self? For a clear and simple explanation of how to script out your brand message, see Donald Miller’s Building A StoryBrand.
To sell more alcohol in the age of neo-prohibitionism’s growing influence and the rise of no and low-alcohol enjoyment, we need to understand our existing customers better.
Start with repeat customers, your evangelists – the people who have given you money for your product(s) more than once.
- Why did they choose you?
- What are they getting out of your product?
- When they consume your product, what else are they doing, with whom, and when? Do they order it out, or drink it at home?
- Do they prefer it in bundles, or individual bottles? Cases, half cases? Single-servings like cans, 750ml, or large format?
- Is it a special occasion purchase, or their daily drinker? How much do they usually spend on a bottle of wine or whiskey?
- How much do they consume, and in what configuration – neat? In cocktails? Cold? Room temp? Over ice, up, on the rocks?
- With a meal? Without a meal? Hosting tastings? Do they enjoy pairings, or couldn’t care less?
- What time of day?
- In what type of glass? Stemless or stemmed? In a lowball or a Glencairn?
- In more than one sitting, the whole bottle, or split with friends?
- What else do they drink? How often do they drink alcohol? What do they drink when they’re not drinking alcohol?
- How do they spend their free time? What circles or communities do they run in? What kind of person are they? What are their beliefs? What do they stand for?
Craft your brand messaging for this person, with their habits in mind. Go and find more of that person. Fish where the fish are, with bait that matches their prey of choice for that time and place.
One can go overboard with questions, sure – you needn’t request a blood panel (unless you’re selling wearable glucose monitors). The questions that are most relevant and strategic will depend on your go to market strategy, products, and brand. Mine these data with discretion, seeking insights that will inform your future outreach and define your ideal customer persona.
Fortunately, eCommerce and DTC sales have made historical customer data collection easier than ever. For just one example of this critical listening exercise, check out this recent Linkedin article from Go Brewing’s founder, Joe Chura, who generously shared some of their recent insights.
Some eCommerce providers offer decent enough reporting to glean a lot of this information already, but there’s nothing wrong with outright asking customers in a survey. Producers who are dissatisfied with the native reporting capabilities of their eCommerce provider can always enlist custom third-party analytics and data warehousing for total command of this listening practice, with the added benefit of pulling from multiple data sources like 3 tier depletions, wine club/subscriptions, and tasting room sales.
Adopt, Adapt, or Accommodate?
In a market pressurized like an overcarbonated homebrew, the stakes feel higher. How do alcohol brands react to changing consumer habits and behaviors?
One detrimental consequence of obsessing over no and low-alcohol’s impact is that we tend to corral ourselves into thinking about alcohol by volume as a zero sum game. “If my customers are drinking more low alcohol options, that means they’re spending less on me!” That’s not necessarily the case, when you seriously consider how your product fits into the broader narrative of their lifestyle, and assimilate your message accordingly.
Customer alignment has always been the path to longevity in business. It’s up to each producer to decide if adopting or adding an NA option to their lineup is worth the investment.
Many wineries, distilleries, and breweries have already added NA offerings to their portfolio and are merrily selling both. Heineken hardly broke a sweat rolling out the world’s best-selling 0.0 ABV beer alongside their flagship offering. Even smaller craft distilleries are releasing creative additions to their regular lineup with botanical NA pours like Burnt Church Distillery’s Amethyst. Bev-alc brands looking to join the fray needn’t restrict themselves to simply alcohol-free expressions of their existing products; this decision, too, warrants a case-by-case (no pun intended) basis.
It’s not just producers cashing in on NA; unsurprisingly, early-adopter wholesalers with robust NA portfolios are seeing their revenue doubled in key markets like Utah — traditionally a relative blind spot in that dry desert.
Sporting a no or low-alcohol option doesn’t make any sense at all for many drinks brands. To “know thyself” is a gift; leaning into your authentic identity has the potential to further endear you to your audience and attune your brand to its proper niche. If your customer base never turns down or dries out, lowering your (alcohol by) volume could estrange your brand from their way of life. One misstep, unfortunately, is sometimes all it takes to fall out of alignment with our loyal customers – to catastrophic effect.
Unless you’re dead-set on all out war with non-alcoholic beverages, an alternative to selling your own NA offerings is to accommodate your existing customer’s preferences wherever applicable. If you find your loyal customers bringing their sober friends and family along for a visit to your tasting room, you likely only stand to gain guest satisfaction and repeat business by accommodating those needs with NA guest taps and a friendly, easy-to-find NA category on your menu.
When your existing website customers experience life change and can’t (or decide not to) drink for whatever reason. Do they still have a way to signify membership in the brand identity you’ve cultivated together? Invite them to customize future shipments, ask for their opinion on future product development, or simply offer branded merchandise like top-notch glassware to enjoy their NA beverages in. Again, look for ways to participate in their lifestyle – barrel-age coffee beans from their favorite roaster in a cool collaboration, or arrange gift sets that make their lives easier around holidays.
Actualize Your Sales Goals
Finally, once it’s clear where your beverage business fits into the big picture, the way to win in a competitive beverage landscape full of seemingly endless choices is to be extremely targeted and strategic with your limited resources in the market.
Tracking sales execution against goals and measuring the results is easier than ever before with specialized CRM tools geared towards beverage alcohol. Beverage brands are already leveraging leading indicators of success like survey questions at the account level to anticipate challenges and outmaneuver their competitors.
There’s never been a more exciting time for consumers. Brands come and go, but our first love – enjoying the little things – isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
by Sarah Nagle
3 Indicators of High Volume in On-Premise Accounts
Depending on your wine or spirits brand, the cocktail of channels you depend upon to drive volume in 2025 may look different than it did five years ago. You might lean more heavily upon E-Premise and Direct to Consumer sales. Still, nothing moves cases like a placement in strategic national accounts, regional chains, and high-volume independents in the right markets.
The natural consequence of devoting more attention to emerging channels is less time to devote to traditional 3-tier sales strategy without investing in more resources. Under these constraints, it’s more important than ever to focus your team’s efforts in the market with a well-researched, highly-targeted plan of attack.
A crucial roadmap resulting from this research is a Key Account Target (KAT) list. By selecting the accounts capable of driving the most volume for your brand and focusing your sales team’s time and efforts — to the neglect of the rest of your available account universe — in those key accounts, you’re more likely to outperform the market and your competitors.
Fortunately, the common traits that characterize high volume accounts are not mysterious if you know what to look for; they’re just not necessarily intuitive either. Drawing upon our collective experience as an industry-leading provider of sales execution solutions for some of the largest wine & spirits brands in the world, here are 5 indicators of high volume in on-premise accounts to seek out when building your own key account target lists in 2025.
1. Fit (For Your Brand/Product/Customer in Particular)
While not an indicator of high volume in its own right, “fit” is every account relationship’s prerequisite for high volume. It must come first. Aside from hurting your brand equity, a mismatched placement in an otherwise high volume account could mean negligible volume and wasted resources for your winery or distillery.
An account that fits the other criteria on this list — say, a rooftop bar featuring live music — might drive a ton of volume for cocktail-friendly spirits brands, craft beer, and RTDs, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to sling your Sonoma Coast Pinot to college kids all night at $95/bottle.
2. Private Parties / Event Space
The adult beverage is the most frequently invited guest at everything from fundraising events to birthday parties, weddings, funerals, and more. It’s the reason so many get into this industry in the first place; beverages bring people together, through the best and worst of times.
If you manage to land a by the glass placement or get on the cocktail list for one of these event menus, you're looking at pallets of reordering potential. Because these event menus are so tightly curated and offer so few options, your product has way fewer brands to compete with. That means the bourbon guy is going to order your pour every single time — he has no other choice!
Pay particular attention in your account research to the number of rooms a hotel has, as well as the square feet of meeting space available for corporate events, banquets, and the like. Getting on the room-service list or landing a banquet menu placement at the right hotel could mean the difference between selling all the wine you make or your inventory gathering dust at the distributor warehouse.
3. Outdoor Seating
Even if owners were willing to ignore fire code and capacity regulations, there’s only so much room inside a restaurant or bar to seat customers, and only so much revenue to squeeze from each guest without overserving them. That’s a little indelicate, perhaps, but this in part explains why venues with balconies, patios, and rooftop bars sell so much more than indoor-only venues.
There’s another, more experiential side to this as well, though — especially in areas with nice weather or a scenic view, tourists and locals alike tend to linger and order more drinks. Look for accounts with multiple excuses for guests to extend their stay, like yard games, live music, trivia nights, and other well-promoted, scheduled attractions.
Bonus High-Volume Indicator: A Well-Loved Social Media Following & High-Quality Web Presence
This one almost goes without saying, but an account that’s not visible online may as well not exist unless they have some niche appeal with older or local demographics or some legendary word-of-mouth cult following. When someone sees that you have a large following, this acts as social proof; it’s the same effect as walking past a crowded restaurant and thinking, “wow, that place must be good.”
Today, you can find everything you need to assemble a high quality key account target list online using Google Places/Maps/Reviews and publications like Eater for even more niche, deep dives into particular markets.While Yelp is not as highly trafficked as it used to be, using filters for the highest number of reviews or (back to Google) searching specifics like “best cocktail bar in Denver” yields a surprising wealth of results for getting started.
3 Practical Applications for Wine & Spirits Industry News and Trends
Keeping up with industry news and trends is one of the most underrated disciplines in beverage alcohol. It’s a frightening habit, admittedly — slowing down long enough to read or at least skim several articles every day when the return on investment takes months or years to materialize.
When sales are down, it’s human nature to scrounge for the fastest wins available. In our desperation to keep the lights on, we abandon most eagerly the very practices that would lead to longevity and profitability for our business.
The inconvenient timing of these insights — namely, that the best articles and industry reports tend to circulate precisely when everyone has checked out for the holidays —only intensifies the competitive advantage up for grabs by those who are paying attention.
An up-to-date understanding of consumer preferences and behavior can inform our production, focus our messaging, and align sales & marketing so that everything from tasting room events to DTC sales and trade promotions all take utmost advantage of what Eugene Schwartz calls “mass desire” in Breakthrough Advertising.
Most people are pretty good at understanding short-term cause and effect, but extrapolating action items and insights from the big-picture, macro level is difficult and rarely obvious. With that in mind, let’s examine 3 practical uses for industry trends that your team can begin implementing today.
1. Keep Your B2B Customers on the Leading Edge of Success: Sales Calls and Account Visits
Most salespeople in Wine & Spirits are so obsessed with presenting the features & benefits of their own product (brand story, tasting notes, over delivering on value . . . like everyone else) that they are leaving the door wide open for you to care — even just a little bit — about your buyer’s business.
One of the best questions to ask, whether your buyer is on or off-premise, is “what tends to sell well here?” Your buyer has only a handful of objectives on their mind, all in service of increasing revenue: 1) getting rid of their inventory, 2) increasing foot traffic, 3) improving guest satisfaction, 4) raising average ticket or order value. If your conversation isn’t directly related to these urgent needs, then — spoiler alert — they have likely checked out of the conversation, because they do not have time for you.
Industry news is some of the lowest hanging fruit available as an excuse for salespeople to reach out to a bar manager or bottle shop owner in a way that is not too self-serving. An insightful article or report has the potential to help your buyers stock products that their customers want and get rid of products that are quickly becoming irrelevant or losing their appeal.
It might sound silly or seem like a small thing, sharing an article in the spirit of, “hey, just wanted to pass this along — are you seeing more customers asking for [x product]?” but your buyers are far too busy to keep tabs on the headlines on their own time. On-premise decision-makers in particular tend to wear so many different hats and juggle so many disparate responsibilities that most of them gladly welcome another ear to the ground on their behalf.
2. Lead Generation and Strategic Marketing Engagements
This aforementioned practice of sharing relevant industry news is no less useful for your marketing department, assuming you are growing a well-qualified email list of prospects and existing customers, accumulating a foundation of first-party data to keep building your business upon.
Instead of relentlessly “blasting” your trade audience with scores and accolades — although there is a place for that, within reason — try functioning instead as an advisor, letting beverage alcohol trends inform your content strategy. If a category that you sell is trending, leverage this as a conversation starter. Segment your on and off premise trade buyers into distinct “buckets” (likely using tags) and tailor your email marketing to each group accordingly so that it feels as though you’re communicating on a 1:1 basis as much as possible.
If, for instance, you learn that consumers are suddenly interested in ranch water en masse, as they were during the pandemic, use this as an excuse to send them a ranch water recipe using your tequila in particular. Just be careful you don’t lump your particular audience in with the rest of the world by default; you can learn a lot about your followers’/prospects’/customers’ interests by paying attention to their click and open rates, the actions they take on your website, and by outright asking them through the use of surveys — another under-utilized feature native to many email service providers.
When it comes to attracting new customers in both trade and consumer channels, industry news or consumer reports can also function as a highly compelling lead magnet. While you can’t gate a SevenFifty Daily, VP Pro, or Wine Business article, you can assemble an original document of your own, compiling industry insights from multiple sources. Linking to industry publications throughout your original resource is also fair game.
If you sell vodka and you just read that the espresso martini is trending this year, compile a list of coffee cocktails using your product and offer a digital booklet or video series of the recipes in exchange for consumer email addresses.
Just be careful, again, that you tailor your messaging differently when targeting trade buyers. Some lead magnets may function as a sort of hybrid trade/consumer magnet in the sense that you could take that same coffee/vodka cocktail guide and frame it as either a staff training for bar programs (for the trade) or as a cheat sheet for home bartenders (for consumers).
The most successful, dedicated B2B-facing lead magnets, however, tend to require a little more “getting into your buyer’s head.” If your winemaker works with off-the-beaten-path varietals and you happen to specialize in Viognier, for instance, you might put together a list of “5 Fast-Selling By-the-Glass Pours for Spring 2025” linking to reports with a favorable outlook for your wines in the New Year.
3. Position Yourself in the Market
It’s no secret that the same exact product can over or under perform depending entirely upon the marketing department’s self-awareness and attunement to demand. Could anyone have predicted the second coming of Stanley? By turning grandpa’s camp mug into a brightly colored tumbler and affiliate marketing machine aimed at a previously untapped customer base, the brand became capable of market penetration well beyond the cookware realm, having transcended the category altogether — born anew as a fashionable status symbol of health and hydration for women everywhere.
Now, attempting to strike gold like this is akin to declaring you want to be a movie star when you grow up. Fortunately, wine and spirits brands needn’t shoot for the moon to reap the benefits of a little market awareness.
Where market trends and industry news really come into play for a beverage brand is in the perfectly achievable micro-adjustments one can make to position any product for maximum impact.
Some of these micro adjustments require more agility than others. Do you produce a number of brands with a wide variety of SKUs in your portfolio? Or are you riding exclusively on one or two products? For producers with larger portfolios and several brands, (de)emphasizing certain brands or varietals seasonally within a strategic marketing calendar can work wonders for sales.
While trade channels require more forethought to time promotions seasonally, keeping the end user in mind (your customers’ customers) gives you something to communicate to decision-makers early on. Depending on the size of the account (regional chains vs. national accounts vs. independents), the time to be thinking about what you want your trade buyers to push in OND could be as early as the previous calendar year for chains and as late as the month before for independents.
While you can’t predict the future, you can use historical data in conjunction with the latest trends to make informed projections about what your buyer might be pining for months from now.
Capitalizing on seasonality isn’t the only way to ride the wave of industry trends. If your brand is somewhere in the middle of the bell curve – reasonably affordable; neither the everyman’s dram nor a white tablecloth indulgence — you have a little more freedom to maneuver up or down the shelf and manipulate consumer perception by testing some new marketing messages and seeing what resonates. A word of caution, again — double check that your customer-base in particular conforms with or defects from the herd you read about in publications.
Packaging and Production are two more agility-dependent adjustments informed by industry trends. When it comes to production, wine sits on one end of the spectrum with the strictest constraints for those who grow instead of sourcing their juice elsewhere, whereas distilleries and breweries (depending, again, on where the grain/hops are sourced) tend to enjoy more freedom to either ramp up production of one SKU while phasing out another according to demand.
While a change in packaging is not always practical, for those who enjoy the freedom to do so, revisiting whether your sauvignon blanc belongs in bottles or cans or entertaining the idea of a RTD cocktail rollout is just one more consideration dependent on the strength and longevity of any given shift in consumer drinking habits.
Devil's Advocate: Timelessness Over Trendiness — Or, A Case for Erosion Resistance
Finally, the ideas expressed here are intended to be taken with a grain of salt. Nobody knows your brand (and your customers) better than you. For some, jumping and adapting at every turn in the wind is the very opposite of the best employable strategy.
Many tenured brands find a contrarian kind of success in not changing or chasing trends. For these legacy brands, knowing when to innovate and when to hold fast while keeping a finger on the pulse of the world around them is the best path to success. Market awareness and the consumption of news is no less valuable, but it may be wielded very differently.
If you want your brand to age like fine wine, you can’t afford to live — unlike your product — under a rock, deep down in a cellar, cut off from the rest of the world.
Watch Where You're Going: Aligning Your KPIs With Your Goals
What’s the opportunity cost of stopping to ingest another piece of content? Two sentences in, are you gripped with a guilty impulse to reach for your phone or keyboard and start making calls instead?
I’d like to redirect your energy so that your success in sales isn’t random or acute, but consistent and chronic — the result of a strategic, focused effort that means doing less and selling more.
Defining Success
If I “get you” to read this article, does that mean I’ve written it well?
“Well,” you might say, “that depends on your goal, I guess. What are you trying to do here —put words in my mouth?”
As tribal creatures, we tend to assume everyone around us is on the same page, that we define success in the same way.
In Chapter 1 of The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel argues that “Nobody’s Crazy” — every one of us handles our finances based on different values, informed by very different life experiences:
“In theory people should make investment decisions based on their goals and the characteristics of the investment options available to them at the time. But that’s not what people do. [In 2006, economists Ulrike Malmendier and Stefan Nagel] found that people’s lifetime investment decisions are heavily anchored to the experiences those investors had in their own generation — especially experiences early in their adult life.”
You might be operating under the assumption that you invest your time working towards what you want. All of us are taking the path that seems most reasonable to us, tracking activities that we believe are the most likely to end in success and avoid failure.
Just because you want something, however, does not mean that your efforts to obtain it are advancing your goals. It’s highly debatable whether or not your decisions are even driven by executive functioning to begin with.
Target Fixation
Anyone who has entered a corner too fast on a motorcycle has had to contend with a phenomenon called “target fixation.” The moment you realize you’re carrying too much speed and unable to turn sharply enough, there’s a strong compulsion to stare directly at your imminent dance partner, whether it be a guardrail, a tree, or a car in the oncoming lane.
In a “target fixation” scenario, you’re focused so intently on not hitting something that your body follows your line of sight straight into it like a tractor beam. Primal fear takes over in a sickening self-fulfilling prophecy.
To overcome this, look instead where you want to go; keep your eyes down the road at the corner’s exit, where you intended to go in the first place. It’s widely understood in motorcycle safety curriculum that “the bike follows your eyes.” Your eyes reside in a head that’s attached to a spine that prefers to stay relatively aligned. Your vision forecasts and projects your locomotion.
Too often, our sales activities and behaviors are driven by fear. We want something so badly, we behave in ways that actively work against us, annoying our buyers or — in a leadership role — setting unattainable targets that demoralize our team.
What do you want?
Seriously. Have you asked yourself, your boss, your partners, and customers this question lately?
Presumably, your team wants to sell more. That’s a start. But how do you think you’re going to get there? What are you actually paying your people to do?
To get your prospects to buy, you have to care about – and invest energy into – helping your buyers get what they want.
Carol Mahoney’s Buyer First brings to the surface something many of us have felt as buyers but failed to internalize when the roles are reversed and it’s our turn to put bread on the table: “selling isn’t something we do to others. It is something we do with them.”
When panic takes control, we’re often so focused on the sale that what our buyer actually gets from us is more cold calls about the features and benefits of our products, further attempts to overcome their objections, and a rampant need to “always be closing” on our timeline — never mind their needs.
Confusing Activity With Achievement
Ahh, yes — the ol’ Wolf of Wall Street chest-beating, “rah-rah” approach to sales. Rally the troops, get those boots on the ground and make stuff happen. Sales leaders prescribe these tactics because they believe it will result in more sales.
The emphasis here is on activity and output. There’s something to be said for this strategy; it’s so prevalent because it works some of the time. It’s at least halfway there. Why? It’s a heck of a lot better than the opposite extreme, perfectionism: that unique brand of paralysis whereby nothing gets done because it’s not up to our impossible standards.
Most sales teams are too busy spraying and praying to stop and evaluate which of their sales activities are actually driving revenue.
In Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, Cal Newport prescribes three key principles as an antidote to our frantic, scattered, unproductive efforts in the modern workplace: 1) Do Fewer Things, 2) Work at a Natural Pace, and 3) Obsess Over Quality. He offers a compelling blueprint for “pursuing meaningful accomplishment while avoiding overload” that holds counterintuitive value for our laughably overburdened sales reps across the 3-tier system.
“What Gets Measured Gets Managed”
Wine & Spirits sales veteran, Ben Salisbury, takes Peter Drucker’s principle here one step further: “what you measure, you get more of.” Simply being aware of this fundamental mechanism can mean the difference between self-sabotage and manifesting your goals.
Suppose that you decide to strength-train for months on end, measuring the number of sets and reps you complete for each exercise, every time you visit the gym. Would you not be more keenly aware of your progress, or lack thereof, than if you were only measuring how many times a week you visit the gym? If and when you discover that your efforts are making a difference, would this not motivate you to keep going, or change course and alter your behaviors if the results are not what you had hoped?
By merely paying attention to something, we are far more likely to invest the time and energy that it takes to improve it. Watch anything long enough, and it pretty quickly becomes excruciating to maintain the status quo. Chief among the reasons we sit down to watch Netflix — and not wet paint — at the end of a long day, is that the object of our attention must change, for better or worse, if it is to hold our interest.
Where this can backfire, of course, is if you measure the wrong thing. If your goal is to sell all the wine you make but you spend every sales meeting and performance review focusing on the number of sales calls your team made and number of accounts sold, you’re going to end up with a bunch of 1-2 case placements while your wine gathers dust in the warehouse.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
If I looked at your CRM right now, what kind of story would it tell me about your goals?
Assuming you’re not just working with a glorified notetaker or worse — a plastic bin full of business cards and some outdated spreadsheets . . . we could pull all kinds of sales data into your dashboard:
- Accounts sold & unsold
- Number of sales calls by channel, account, sales rep
- Number of engagements (responses) by channel, account type,
- Order commitments vs. actual Retail Account Depletions (RAD)
- Surveys
- Promotional events and tastings
- Staff trainings and presentations
- Sales volume by brand, SKU, channel, varietal, vintage, packaging, size, quantity
- Lift
- Velocity
- Inventory
- Revenue year over year
. . . to name a few.
Are sales down this year despite an increase in account activity? Honestly evaluate whether or not there’s been too much emphasis on quantity metrics that tend to propagate themselves like weeds without necessarily bearing fruit.
Off-the-beaten-path metrics like “churn” can help us determine the quality of the accounts we’re in. By devoting our limited resources to the “stickiest” accounts with the best fit for our brand, we can achieve far higher volume than we could by landing fleeting placements in hundreds of high-churn accounts.
It Takes a Village
If our internal behavior and goals are so often out of alignment, how likely is it that we’re aligned with our partners and customers on our mutual goals?
There was once a time when distributors were capable of actively selling to retailers on the supplier’s behalf so much so that the supplier needed only to “manage” their distributors to succeed. In today’s unworkable bottleneck — thanks to too many brands and too few distributors — the best that a supplier can expect is for the distributor to match the supplier’s own efforts in the market.
For a supplier, success in 2024 actually entails more collaboration, not less. In this “help me help you” scenario, timely and accurate communication with the distributor is more important than ever before.
Automation = Domination
As suppliers generate their own demand in the market and take order commitments, keeping the distributor informed on activities in key accounts (and staying informed on the distributor’s activities) eliminates duplicate efforts and ensures the best experience possible for retailers, increasing the likelihood of repeat business.
Shared data isn’t just about retailer rapport. Updating sales and promotional targets and gaining visibility into the distributor’s execution against those targets as quickly and frequently as possible is a matter of survival. The beverage alcohol space is too crowded and competitive; the brands who communicate the clearest and fastest with their distributors will come out on top.
A few early adopters are already using automation to their advantage, keeping their sales execution data and key account activity updated in near-real time between supplier, distributor, and distributor sales reps in the field. The brands and wholesalers who can afford these tools early on are seeing a sharp competitive edge, taking advantage of this brief window of time before the middle of the bell curve catches on.
Granularity and Gumption
As with anything in life, our success in business depends entirely upon the relevance of the agreed-upon metrics we share with our partners to track our progress incrementally.
That last word, “incremental,” is worth camping out on for one last point.
We have trouble wrapping our minds around mountains, but getting to the top of the next hill is rarely a problem. Picturing a gargantuan goal all at once invites us to despair, where granularity gives us just enough to manage at one time. Smaller units of measurement give our brains’ reward pathways more scaffolding to keep us moving forward. Consistent, measurable progress is powerful enough to carve canyons under the right conditions.
It’s not enough to just find the right KPIs; evaluating progress across a variety of time horizons helps make sense of an otherwise overwhelmingly big picture, like grab handles on an industrial sized refrigerator.
In the face of daunting goals, we are most powerful when we are most vulnerable; communicating frequently with our allies and embracing a willingness to hold one another accountable to the small, achievable, daily tasks is enough. Staying aligned means getting there in the shortest amount of time possible.
Pricing Strategy Simplified: How to Harness Pricing Data for Maximum Profitability
It’s very tempting to lower prices to stay competitive in a down market like ours, believing that’s what’s required to be competitive. But this should never be an intuitive, emotional decision.
The data will tell you whether you should get more aggressive with your pricing, stand pat, or even raise your prices.
The price-sensitive nature of the wine & spirits industry
The wine and spirits industry is very competitive—extremely competitive if we’re honest—due to the overwhelming number of SKUs on the market (experts estimate that there are more than 175,000 wine brands for sale in the US).
There are so many similar products at similar price points that this abundance of choice causes price sensitivity in buyers (both trade and consumers alike).
However, not all consumers base their decisions on price. Need proof? Sales of wines selling for $50+ are up 1%. That’s nearly a 14-point swing from the overall market. Domestic wines in the $50+ price range are up even higher at +3%.
You can see that it’s tempting to hit the lower-the-price lever without hard data. But don’t make any pricing decisions that are not rooted in data.
Pricing is more transparent than ever before
Given the plethora of e-commerce, online platforms, and purchasing apps, consumers and trade buyers (retailers and restaurants) can quickly and easily compare prices across brands.
This puts massive pressure on products to undercut or at least stay on par with competitors.
Many retailers now maintain extensive online stores that show every publicly available price. Consumers and trade buyers can shop leisurely without getting up from their desks (or couches).
Lowering prices or offering aggressive discounts to avoid losing market share may be necessary, but only sometimes.
For entry-level and mid-tier brands, price is a big differentiator in consumers' minds. However, there are alternatives to lowering the price, such as differentiation via unique storytelling and strong brand recognition.
Strategies to mitigate the impact of price transparency
To avoid the pitfalls of price transparency, a brand must seriously consider these critical strategies:
- Brand differentiation: Developing a strong brand identity and special product attributes (like sustainability, limited production, or the highest-quality ingredients and production methods) can help prop up prices and reduce the sensitivity of price comparisons.
- Value-added services: Personalized customer service, custom packaging, or trade marketing support provide a platform of permission to build relationships beyond price.
- Scarcity: Emphasizing the rarity of offerings can mitigate price sensitivity for premium products and categories. Consumers will be willing to pay more for perceived value beyond the price on the shelf.
- Leverage data: Analytics can help producers better understand market trends, competitors’ pricing, and demand. With the right data, brands can adjust pricing more strategically, avoiding the danger of across-the-board price cuts.
Maintaining profitability and brand equity without giving in to the pressure to reduce prices is possible. Producers can thrive even amid high levels of competition and market transparency by focusing on brand value, meaningful differentiation, and strategic pricing.
The dangers of aggressive pricing
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But, danger lurks within aggressive pricing strategies. Dangers such as:
- Erosion of brand perception: Lowering prices too much risks putting your brand positioning at risk. Perceived value is critical, and—especially in this industry—lower pricing denotes lower quality.
- Price wars: Once price-cutting starts, competitors often follow suit, leading to a race to the bottom.
- Impact on profit margins: Lowering prices may temporarily boost sales but reduce profitability. Fewer funds are available for essential activities like marketing and innovation, which are critical for long-term growth.
- Discount dependency: Consumers and retailers begin to expect ongoing discounts, leading to an unsustainable reliance on price cuts and discounting to maintain sales volumes.
The complexity of distributor pricing data
It is a monumental challenge for producers to collect, aggregate, and interpret distributor pricing data.
Throw in the essential need to price differently across regions, trade channels, and accounts, and it becomes hard to imagine doing this right without data.
Many producers are utterly unaware that the tools already exist to share, communicate, and manage pricing data.
Managing all of this manually comes with a high price. This includes errors, time consumption, and a lack of real-time insights.
Brands that thrive today leave nothing to chance. They know how to simplify the three-tier pricing process using sophisticated software platforms like our Pricing Gateway.
By leveraging systems and software, brand owners can not only save many hours by eliminating the need for manual work.
Accurate pricing data ensures maximizing profitability
The industry is replete with examples of brands that “lost their way, " allowing brand equity (pricing power) to dwindle.
Avoiding this dilemma requires continually monitoring and analyzing distributor and retailer pricing.
It is nearly impossible to spot opportunities for improved profitability without real-time data provided automatically by your distributor network.
Distributors are also under enormous pressure. Driven by the need to lower inventory costs, distributors will continue to pressure suppliers to become more aggressive with their pricing. Some do it without even consulting the supplier! This need not happen to your brand if you have a clear line of sight into what your distributors are doing with pricing.
Access to real-time data is key to avoiding this. It can help strike the right balance between staying competitive and maintaining your targeted pricing margins.
Turning data into dollars
In summary, automating and simplifying your pricing management systems is key.
Do you need a thorough investigation (audit) of your current systems?
Would you like to see examples of suppliers who have invested in modern pricing management systems and hear how those investments paid for themselves?
Would you like to see these data-driven pricing systems in action?
We invite you to contact us and let us show you how to do what so many others are already doing. Your brand's equity, performance in the marketplace, and profitability depend upon it!
Mastering the Middle Tier: Using Data to Drive Distributor Success
It’s no secret that gaining mindshare from your distribution partners has become challenging.
After all, their portfolios are overflowing with things to sell. How can you stand out?
Avoid the most common pitfalls
Is your company guilty of any of these?
- You leave it up to your distributors to decide where to sell your products.
- You don’t spend time analyzing the data your distributors provide.
- You fail to make a compelling case for why your products deserve to be on the shelf or the wine list.
- You don’t spend enough time researching where the best account opportunities lay in key markets.
- You don’t appreciate that your distributors have thousands of brands to represent.
The best way to optimize the collaboration with your distributors is to study the data.
The data will tell you where the best opportunities are and where the “gaps” in distribution are so you can squeeze every last case available to your brands.
Not all distributors are alike
Depending on the market, each distributor has strengths and weaknesses.
Some are dialed into the chains and enjoy access to the biggest buyers in the state.
Some excel in the independent accounts.
Some distributors’ portfolios are jam-packed with competitive SKUs. Others, not so much.
Some distributors specialize in the on-premise. Others are stronger in off-premise.
Most have access to category data, but some do not.
Some distributors have market share dominance.
If you use a one-size-fits-all approach to your array of distributors, don’t be surprised when your sales results are falling below expectations.
Leveraging data to maximize distributor potential
Your primary aim should be to help your distributors help you. This requires continually studying key data points such as:
- Depletion growth year over year.
- Growth in accounts sold.
- Grown in points of distribution.
- A clear understanding of the top 25 accounts for your products and the share of total volume those top accounts represent.
- “Account penetration” of your target account lists. (It’s up to YOU to provide this to them).
- Velocity (sales per POD) in your top accounts.
- Days on hand of inventory.
- Accounts that are “at risk” of losing distribution.
- Which distribution points did your team achieve compared to those your distributors achieved on your behalf?
Thanks to modern sales execution software, this data is more accessible to obtain than ever before.
Always knowing where you stand is not solely the distributor's job. You must do your part.
Allocate your resource where it will make the most impact
There are three primary resources to manage:
- Time: Identify high-performing distributors who deserve more direct engagement and support versus lower-performing ones who may require a different strategy.
- Money: How to allocate trade marketing budgets according to which distributors will most likely deliver the best results.
- People: Determine which distributor sales teams and distributor manager to provide with extra support from YOUR sales team members.
To ensure maximum sales impact, you must decide where to spend time, money, and people because not all accounts, markets, or distributors are equal.
How to tailor your approach to each distributor
This all comes down to collaboration.
Take goal-setting as an example. “Whose” goals are these? The distributors? Yours? Or are the goals jointly owned?
If a distributor falls short of your expectations, don’t be too quick to blame them. Nowadays, goals are met consistently only through the alignment of expectations and joint efforts in each market.
But HOW do you do it?
Here are a few keys to consider:
- Make sure your goals are realistic and in line with the market trends.
- Fully participate in the achievement of your goals, leveraging a do-it-first approach.
- Respect your distributors' time by not asking for information you could easily obtain on your own.
- Become keenly aware of other products in the distributors' portfolio that directly compete with your products.
- Take the time to learn (and follow) the distributors’ preferences for communicating with them (and how often).
- Strive to know the sales data better than your distributors do. They have a LOT on their plates!
A surefire way to be disappointed in your distributors is to use a one-size-fits-all approach. Building “customized” relationships driven by hard data would be best.
The cost of ignoring the data
Far too many supplier partners utilize a just-do-it, intuitive approach to working with distributors.
They go by “instincts,” relationships, and experience when they should be going by empirical data and facts.
It is simply too crowded and competitive to go by gut feel.
Suppliers must continually monitor the most essential KPIs and be ready to shift resources from lower-impact to higher-impact distributors.
Beware of the spoken (and unspoken) “silos” that exist inside your organization. It’s incumbent upon the sales leaders to regularly assess where, when, and how much these shifts in resources should take place.
Once again, relying on the data to guide your decisions is critical.
Modern methods for collaborating with distributors
Thanks to modern software platforms like BevPath, suppliers can quickly bring their entire distribution team to the table to collaborate and share things such as:
- Target accounts lists
- KPIs
- Sales execution data
- Sales results and performance
This “real-time” digital collaboration is a game changer!
The goal is to improve execution in the marketplace collaboratively and easily.
There’s no longer a need to email static spreadsheets back and forth, which makes maintaining “version control” nearly impossible.
The ability for both parties to have complete visibility in real-time to all sales-related data not only saves precious time but also allows for better execution and results.
We invite you to contact us for a full overview and demonstration of BevPath’s capabilities.
About
Analytics. Data. Vision.
Andavi Solutions provides category leading software with actionable data insights connecting partners within the beverage alcohol and consumer packaged goods industries.
Andavi Solutions offers an integrated suite of technology solutions to provide insights, drive superior decision-making, and deliver ROI across the value chain.
Solution Focus
- Software and technology solutions within beverage alcohol and adjacent CPG categories
- Commitment to innovation and market leadership
- Develop and invest in providing an end-to-end close-loop integrated data analytics platform
- Building solutions that provide clear actionable insights through field level sales execution
Our Difference
- Commitment to building an integrated technology solution through key partnerships, while accelerating innovation and growth
- Customer-first philosophy and emphasis on developing quality solutions to bring additional value to our customer base
- Create continuous upside opportunities for our investors, employees, partners, and customers
Contact
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Location List
| Locations | Address | State | Country | Zip Code |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Andavi Solutions | 2550 W Union Hills St, ste 350, Phoenix | AZ | United States of America | 85027 |
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