Every Monday I throw out a challenge to readers. Something to keep everybody on the right track toward accomplishing the right goals and moving your wine career forward. This week: the 60 day sprint and how to be ready for it. ### Welcome to October 31st and happiest of Halloweens! A favorite holiday around our Read More…
Month: October 2016
The power of thinking you have control
Walk in to an elevator, press the button for the floor you want to go to, and nothing happens. What do you do next? If you’re like most people, you press the door close button. Sometimes it works but with a delay, sometimes it closes right away, and sometimes you have to hit it twice Read More…
He said, She said, They said
Chatter is a problem, and the rumor mills that have been built via instant communication and social media are pretty staggering. More so than ever, you have to be careful about what you hear, what you say, and what you choose to tell others. Golden rules: Don’t start rumors. Don’t propagate rumors. Don’t buy into Read More…
Hiring Great Wine People
How do you hire the top performers for your wholesale operation, restaurant, or retail shop? How do you find the wine energized people out there, the ones that can do their job extremely well without thinking the wine world revolves around them? (Which is a monumental problem in the wine business.) How do you, as Read More…
Wine Industry Baggage and Assumptions
When you walk into a new account as a sales rep, one that doesn’t know you at all personally but might have opinions about who you work for, what kind of assumptions could that customer make? Perhaps more importantly, what kind of assumptions do YOU make about what they are thinking? And in that instance, Read More…
Monday Challenge: Have you fallen off the track?
Every Monday I send out a Monday Challenge. This week: stay on target, set your goals, and recognize when you are off the track (while making a plan to get back on track and on target). One example of being off the track? Sending a “Monday Challenge” on Tuesday morning, like I’m doing now. Goal setting and Read More…
What’s the goal?
What are you REALLY trying to achieve? If it’s simply “more money” and “more sales” then guess what … that’s how you come across. It’s a bit desperate and people see through it. It’s not a bad thing to go after the dollar, but true growth can only happen when the purpose is higher. Here’s a Read More…
Wine sales is not a zero sum game
The idea that if one wine is bought, then another can’t be. That there is only so much space. This is the thinking of the old guard. There is a new dynamic in play, and the best wine sales reps in the nation are doing it. That of the giver and connector. If you can Read More…
Monday Challenge: Share your contract
This week’s challenge is super easy, if you completed last week’s (Write your own contract). The goal last week was self-accountability. To list the primary goals you need to achieve between now and the end of the year, and the steps necessary to achieve those goals. Then you were to put it into a contract, and Read More…
The Little Things
… the way the server picked the dirty knife off your plate, set it down, and took the plate away instead of just giving you a new knife. … the way the manager was being mean to the bartender. … the way the sales rep that just walked in interrupted your meeting “just for a second.” Read More…
Why are THEY so much better than YOU?
Every organization, especially those based on sales and/or hospitality has them. The superstar. The one for whom everything comes easy. They take on more work, they execute flawlessly. They are happy and they build forward momentum. Sometimes it’s the new kid in the organization. Sometimes a veteran with thirty years experience. Age has nothing to Read More…
Say it often, say it over and over, then say it again
We’re seeing accumulative negative marketing in the current political season. Because of social media, the more something get said, and the more people hear it, the more it becomes ingrained in the messaging, the more it’s repeated, and the more it’s paid attention to. Sadly, many of the things being bantered about are lies and Read More…
A little about a lot, or a lot about a little
Assessing what you know is a good exercise. Of course, you might not know what you don’t know, but you can usually make an accurate judgement through a gut feeling when thinking about your peers. Some of your peers seem to know a little bit about every wine. Snippets, sound bites, info-bits. They can pull Read More…
Considering Portugal: Encruzado
I just returned from leading a small group through Portugal, via our little side-business travel company, The Flying Grape. You can catch photos via The Flying Grape Facebook page (website coming soon). When thinking about new and shiny, and categories of wines that your competition does not have, Portugal should come to mind first. There is Read More…
Monday Challenge: Write your own contract
Every Monday I throw out a challenge to readers, sometimes small and simple and sometimes larger and more involved. This one is more large and involved, but the results can be life changing. The Nobel Prize for Economic Science was just released, and it went to Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström, two scientists who have studied Read More…
It’s the singer, not the song (as long as the wine is good)
Fictional scenario, but play along: Two sales reps. Two different wholesalers. One buyer. Both reps bring in the same wine. Not the same label, but the same juice in the bottle. What’s going to happen? The buyer will buy one wine and not the other. It’s the “why?” of this equation that needs to be examined Read More…
The most overlooked wine placement
As a wine wholesale rep, are you using the cold box correctly? Pre-chilled wine is big business. With fewer and fewer people buying wine in bulk and rather grabbing multiple single bottles during the week, the cold box placement is gold. Every single sales call must address this, and a cold box placement can easily Read More…
Who is your mentor?
Study after study proves the same thing: those that work with mentors outperform all others my a monumental percentage. If you can find somebody in your orbit that understands and supports what you’re doing, but they can bring more experience and ideas to the table, ask for them to mentor you. They might be taken Read More…
Adding value when something costs nothing
Taking pictures used to be expensive. First you had to decide what kind of film to use. Black and white, color negative, or color positive. A 24 shot roll would cost you $4-10, a 36 shot roll between $6 and $13. Then you had to take the pictures. No clue how they eventually would look. Read More…
You’re writing a story
Every interaction you have with your customers is another chapter in the story. And the more chapters there are in the story, the more complex and intimate and important it can be. But don’t forget it’s an evolving narrative, that should pick up where the previous chapter left off. Each interaction (chapter) is not a Read More…
Quick Wine Math Quiz
Get ready, get set, go! What percentage of a 12 bottle case is one bottle? If the alcohol content of a wine goes from 12% to 13% what is the percentage volume increase in that alcohol content? If you buy a wine at $10.00 and sell it for $15.00, what is you margin? If you Read More…
Be the one to point out the obvious
I live in a city of a quarter million people, the capital of my state, in a metro area of three million. I live in a peacefully urban area laid out in the early 1900’s with alleys and grid streets. Ask most people in the country what day is “trash day” in their neighborhood and Read More…
Monday Challenge: Sense of Place
Every Monday I throw out an idea to challenge the readers. This week: Sense of Place. Pick a personal favorite wine region. Google that region with the words “wine map” and get a high quality image or two of the area. Then go the Wikipedia page for the main village or town in the region. Read More…
Identifying Doctor No
Every organization seems to have one. The curmudgeon, the naysayer, the one who resists change with every atom in their body. They don’t want the new software. They don’t want more training. They don’t want more accounts. They don’t see the value in group effort. They are Doctor No. Maybe they don’t say no to Read More…
What are you selling? A product or a brand?
If you are selling a product, you need to lead with the attributes of that product. The varieties in the bottle, the alcohol content, the main competition on the shelf or on the wine list. It’s mano a mano, one wine against the others. But if you are selling a brand, it’s a totally different Read More…