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.