A winery we’ll call ABC had a loyalty club whose membership stretched back decades. Records were kept in a jumble of Excel spreadsheets, paper lists, sales team Rolodexes and other disconnected information silos.  For a multi-million-dollar business operating in the digital age, they may as well have stuffed receipts in shoeboxes. 

Results were predictable: Full-color brochures mailed, at high cost, to dead people. Coveted invites to lavish catered meals rewarding top customers sent to people who hadn’t bought cases in years. Promising new restaurant and other potential high-volume customers not invited since organizers had no idea if they had room. Marketing funds wasted, like fine wine poured down the drain.

Meantime, excise tax calculations took many hours of employee time, as did tracking loyalty discounts by customer, as purchase volumes rose and fell.  Even with massive effort, mistakes were made.  Missed eligibility for new discount levels led to customer complaints, while under-charged clients who’d dropped levels meant more money out the door.

Getting tasting room and wine tour visitors to sign paper guestbooks, and guestbook data typed into spreadsheets, were also Herculean tasks. ABC estimated over half of tasting room visitors never got any follow-up marketing at all.

Automating the data harvest:

If any of these challenges sound familiar, it may be time to review your customer data management systems. Historically, wineries seeking to automate customer data have taken three approaches:

• Full EDMS: Some very large wineries have embraced full-bore enterprise data management systems, of the sort developed by IBM and EDS/HP for the likes of IBM and EDS/HP.  Have a spare $15-$20,000 in purchase and set-up charges, plus $5-$7K/year in service fees?  A full-on customized EDMS system may be for you.
• Standalone CRM Software:  Small wineries sometimes automate customer data via off-the-shelf “customer relationship management” software like Zoho, Freshworks or Pipedrive.  Such products are certainly better than shoeboxes.  But they barely reduce data entry burdens for tasting rooms, and rarely connect with Point of Sale (POS), inventory or other systems.  So crucial customer data remains in silos.
• All-in-one CRM systems for wineries:  A few firms now offer winery-specific CRM systems combining proprietary CRM, POS, inventory management, wine club and reservations management in a single package.  Convenient – but for many growing wineries, limiting.  Some all-in-one systems, for instance, include POS credit-card processing that slaps on high fees. Others restrict complex CRM uses like dedicated B2B sales pipelines.  Few allow integration with best-of-breed software the winery chooses.

“Best of Breed” Customer Data Ecosystems:

WineryConnect instead offers a software integration “hub” designed specifically for wineries that lets owners choose their own favorite service partners in virtually all areas of operations. The WineryConnect “hub” links best-of-breed products together, like spokes in a wheel, with CRM capabilities integrated throughout the system. Consumers can enter data they choose to share from their own mobile devices, and select data is harvested automatically at POS. All customer data is shared seamlessly and automatically across systems in a hub-and-spoke system that grows with your business, ready to carry you where you want to go.

For instance, WineryConnect’s hub-and-spoke system links to a range of choices of:

• POS systems: WineryConnect’s hub is fully integrated today with top-selling POS partner Revel, and integration is well underway with Square.  You choose the POS system that works best for you; WineryConnect links it to the rest of your data.
• Online Stores and eCommerce: Already connected to Nexternal, WineryConnect will soon offer full integration with Shopify and WooCommerce. 
• Production Control:  Today WineryConnect integrates fully with Innovint.  Integration partners will soon include Process2Wine and Vintrace.
• Customer Communications:  WineryConnect’s software hub links (either directly or via an eCommerce partner) with MailChimp and Constant Contact for easy, professional email marketing: pricy color-printed brochures no longer needed!
• Accounting: Either directly or via your chosen POS system, WineryConnect can draw data straight from QuickBooks records to help with financial & inventory planning.
• Reporting:  WineryConnect’s software hub (VinESB) pulls data across partner systems to allow easy, segmented reporting.  No more hand-figuring excise taxes or loyalty levels! 
• Data Transfer: VinESB automatically backs up data so producers keep their customer and order information even across changes in POS and eCommerce systems.
• Contactless Guestbook:  New this year, Contactless Guestbook lets tasting rooms, shops, and restaurant tent-ads display easily generated QR codes.  Consumers scan the code with their own mobile device, select privacy settings, and enter data they choose to share – which VinESB automatically links to all other winery systems. 

WineryConnect’s “Grape Squad” can help with both real and artificial intelligence to remove repeat entries, misspellings, etc., leaving clean, reliable data customers have agreed to share.

Today, ABC ‘s online sales are up by 1500%, marketing costs are down, and excise reporting’s  a breeze.  Learn how our hub-and-spoke “wheel” can help you too get moving and grow!

For More Information:

Sales:  Keelan Hathaway

Keelan@wineryconnect.com

(585) 504-6030 (Text & Voice)