Peter Parker can shoot webs and swing from building to building. Aquaman can swim underwater like a dolphin. Bruce Wayne builds great gadgets and tools to help get his job done (plus he drives a pretty awesome car). And what do you do? We all have superpowers. The strengths that set us apart from others. Read More…
Month: May 2019
A Sales Rep’s Choices
A wine sales rep is in a marvelous and privileged position. You get to choose. Today, are you building a brand or building the market? Tomorrow, are you finding the unknown (wine or customer), or are you learning the known even better? Next week, are you showcasing the new or reinforcing the established? What are Read More…
The irreplaceable placement
Many restaurants have one or two. Every retailer has six to twelve. They are the wines they cannot swap out, cannot consider getting rid of, and cannot possibly imagine life without. They are the wines that customers would riot over losing access to. The wines that sell as regularly as a heartbeat. They are the Read More…
Rethinking Points of Distribution
The acronym is PODs, and if you work in a larger wholesaler or for a big winery, you hear this term often. If you work for a small wholesaler you may not hear it at all. PODs represent placements, and for every wine in every market with every distributor there is a certain number of Read More…
Invent your own week
This is for wine retailers and restaurants. It’s an easy way to drive some traffic and get some attention from the local wine community. It’s repeatable and scalable. And it’s a way to train and focus your staff at the same time. And it’s a way to have fun while selling more wine. And yet Read More…
By the numbers: larger public wine tastings
If you are a wine retailer, wine group, or wine organization that puts together the occasional wine tasting for the public, here are some ideas to keep in mind for a successful event. This essay is focused on the small to the mid-sized event, for attendance in the 80 to 800 person range. Large convention Read More…
What is the modern wine wholesaler?
It’s never been this hard for wine sales reps. It used to be that you could sell on quality because there was a lot of crap wines being pushed into the market. Train your customers what good wine was all about, then they would buy what you were selling. Then we entered the era of Read More…
Wine for customers, or customers for wine?
Which direction are you going? Are you finding a wine for your customers, or are you finding customers for your wine? This is one of the big questions, for it shows the intention of the business and at the same time dictates how a sales call should and will proceed. If you are a wholesaler, Read More…
Reinvention
Don’t try reinventing the wheel. The wheel is perfect. And it works great. And any change in the shape of a wheel makes it work less well. There are aspects of your job that are a wheel. Leave them alone. But for all the other parts … maybe a little reinvention is needed. Your intro Read More…