The month of December is a strange one for the wine sales rep. Sales are up. Customers are buying more than other months. But due to the efficiency of the sales and the busy-ness that everybody is experiencing, there is little room for the idle conversation and no room for the product pitch. More sales Read More…
Category: Brands
Constant, consistent, and always evolving change
Nothing stays the same for long. Restaurants open and close. Often with little or no warning. Distributors merge and portfolios shift. Always with no hint that it’s coming. Retailers have ups and downs, successes and failures, great days and horrible weeks, sometimes for no apparent reason. Every wine on every wine list in the world changes Read More…
You can’t have it all
You know you can’t have it all. You can’t sell every single wine in your portfolio to every account in your territory. You can’t sell a retailer all of their wine selections, leaving out all competition. You can’t magically open all the doors at all the restaurants and have them buy only from you. So why Read More…
Selling Champagne
There are a few fundamental differences between selling Champagne (and I’m only talking about real deal Champagne here) and other wine categories. Consumers tend to buy it one bottle at a time. And thus, without another glass next to it for comparison and assuming it’s served quite cold, it’s hard to make a call on Read More…
If you don’t know what to say …
… then don’t say anything. Too many people love the sound of their own voice far too much. Learn to listen. Learn to not talk when necessary. Through careful and considered communication you will stand out, not through endless blather and babble. Know when to keep your trap shut and ears open and you’ll sell Read More…
What you can’t measure
Loyalty. Smiles. Thank yous. Dedication. Focus. Positivity. Resilience. Creativity. Innovation. Attitude. Ideas. Friendships. Relationships. Partnerships. Be careful about trying to measure everything. Much of the most important stuff is impossible to quantify. If you ignore something simply because you can’t measure it, then you’ll lose it all.
Then you have a brand
Two scenarios. A company assembles 100 carefully chosen wine consumers. They enter a room and taste and rank five whites and five reds. Then they leave. The statisticians come in. They analyze the numbers. They discover the one white and one red the crowd liked the most. They speculate why. The scientists come in and Read More…
More Wines, More Distributors (what is competition?)
Every major metro area in the United States is seeing an explosion of new wine distributors. Most are small. Some are mid sized. All are passionate and carry wines that were usually not in that market before they came around. The first to complain about this? The established distributors. “More competition! How can our market Read More…
It’s your job
If you are a sales rep, it’s your job: to have a current catalog at hand to have current pricing sheets at the ready to have your phone charged up for the day to have extra time built into your schedule to handle last second needs of your customers to know how best to communicate Read More…
Thin skin vs. Thick skin
Thin skinned salespeople are impacted by the word NO, are hesitant to ask for the big sale, always question what they said and if they did the right thing, and are generally nervous about how a customer feels about them. But so called “thin skinned” salespeople are also better attuned to the emotions of a Read More…
DIY Prime Day
Amazon Prime Day didn’t exist before Amazon decided it should exist. Why is it so successful? Because they have a dedicated fan base that responds to deals, offers, suggestions, reviews, and consistent fulfillment (if they are out of stock, you usually know it before the pain of ordering and never seeing it). So the steps Read More…
The squeeze and the sales rep
The life of a sales rep used to be quite easy. If you showed up every week, you got the sale and business grew. The good ‘ol days! (Which of course were harder than it sounds, but sales reps stuck in the past seem it think it was less work.) Everything has changed in the Read More…
The gut instinct
“When you follow your gut, you get indigestion.” Sage advice coming from somebody as disconnected from the real world as possible: a Fortune 100 CEO in a high rise Manhattan corner office, who wrote a book about productivity years ago, aimed squarely at the people that he needed more of: workers, not thinkers. Being aware Read More…
Give them what they want?
Or give them what they don’t know they want? The smartphone didn’t exist until Steve Jobs pulled it out of his pocket. Uber didn’t exist until you downloaded the app and made your account. NakedWine didn’t exist until somebody said “what about crowdfunding for a winemaker?” Do you give people what they want, or Read More…
How empires topple
Every major wine market in the United States has one dominant distributor and one dominant retailer (or a chain of stores). Sometimes it’s not actually obvious who the dominant players are, but just a little bit of research will easily unlock the secret of who sells the most wine. These are the empires. And just Read More…