Press Release | Andavi Solutions Acquires Tradeparency

Andavi Solutions, a beverage alcohol software company, has acquired Tradeparency, a leading industry pricing solution. Read more now!

Choosing the Right Wine Pricing Tool | Tradeparency

The profitability and brand integrity of your winery ties to how you manage your pricing. Learn how to select the wine right pricing tool.

Wine Pricing for National On-Premise Accounts | Tradeparency

National account managers are the key to greater distribution, yet they are often the forgotten people in wine pricing management. Read more.

If you are happy with your current sales level and are on track to hit all of your depletion and revenue goals in 2024, this article is not for you. Just hit your back button and return to whatever you were busy doing before this headline caught your eye.

But if growing your sales and hitting your goals are high on your list of things that occupy your waking (or supposed-to-be-sleeping) hours, please read on. 

Why a Great Product Isn’t Enough to Achieve Sales Success

Here is an interesting observation: Most wine and spirits companies need to grow their sales. Some of them quite desperately. The typical methods they deploy to attack this objective almost always involve the same twelve things:

1. Craft compelling stories to sell their products
2. Emphasize the features and benefits of their products
3. Pursue awards and accolades
4. Spend small fortunes on social media and influencer marketing
5. Spend even larger fortunes on brand awareness
6. Pursue liquid-to-lips opportunities
7. Conduct market blitzes
8. Create incentives for their distributors
9. Spend time and money on educating others about their products
10. Send out promo emails like a curtain of fire
11. Run FB and IG ads attempting to stimulate eCommerce purchases with a “buy now” CTA
12. Attend tastings and events

But notice what is conspicuously absent from this list: leveraging technology and data. 

This is woefully imprudent because leveraging technology and data will yield FAR more excellent results than any of the items listed above.

And the reason for this oversight is an intense focus on the product itself. 

It's an easy mistake to make.

After all, wine is sexy. Whiskey is seductive. Vodka is silky. Mezcal is smokey. Prosecco is sweet and sparkly. Gin is sophisticated. To NOT talk about these products, you have to tear yourself away from them!

Traction Tramples Tradition

Most wine and spirits salespeople (and marketers) believe if consumers and trade knew more about the product (who made it, where and how it was made, etc.) and had an opportunity to taste it, they would purchase it.

This seems logical on the face of things, but the product, no matter how differentiated and delicious one might think, is simply not enough to sell it successfully. It takes so much more than that.

The “Product” is only one of the five Ps of marketing. By focusing disproportionately and narrowly on the product itself, you risk de-leveraging the OTHER four P’s:

• Price
• Promotion
• Place
• People

And it's in relation to these four Ps that technology and data shine. 

Accelerating Sales with the “Other 4 P’s”

Whether you like it or not, you operate in one of the planet's most complex and competitive consumer product categories.

It takes more than a great product to win the sales game.

There will be winners and losers in 2024. If you want to be on the winning side, pay close attention.

The good news is that the data will tell you about everything you need to know. The bad news is that it’s neither fun nor sexy.

The good news is that technology will allow you to scale, leverage, and propel your sales success to unimaginable levels and leave your competitors in the dust. The bad news is that your heart rate will remain unaltered. 

Advisory: some readers may experience a cold and dispassionate reaction to the remaining content of this article.

Pricing

Question: Who wants to talk about pricing?

Answer: Just about nobody.

Try this experiment: The next time you host a wine dinner, stand up and say, “OK, let’s talk about the pricing strategies for this wine as it relates to brand equity and profitability.” 

Nevertheless, let’s try to make this topic as concupiscent as possible. 

Pricing is powerful. Pricing drives performance. How well you plan, measure, analyze, collaborate, and systematize your pricing strategy is directly related to your level of sales success.

Pricing will make or break your brand’s performance. Pricing is precise. Pricing is not to be taken lightly.

Your pricing strategy can be used to increase profitability, boost sales, strengthen your pattern relationships, optimize efficiency, and gain valuable insights into the marketplace.

The right pricing technology lets you effectively plan, analyze, optimize, and promote your brand.

Promotion

The intense competition in our category causes many wine and spirits brands to behave foolishly and imprudently regarding their promotional spending. 

With wild-eyed enthusiasm and visions of grandeur, we love to promote aggressively. Drive that price down! Stimulate trial and purchases! Yank that product off the shelf! Drive those distributor salespeople into a selling frenzy!

But how much time and energy do we spend analyzing the return on investment of these promotional programs? Very little, indeed.

The problem is that this is simply too much work without a robust technology solution!

All that manual data entry, emailing spreadsheets back and forth, and the sales department running wild without collaboration with the finance department. 

And who has the TIME to conduct post-promotion analysis? We’ve got to get busy launching the next promotion! This shoot-first, ask questions later is rampant.

“We made fourteen new by-the-glass placements!” Congratulations, but what did it cost us per case? “We moved 28 cases!” Marvelous, but at what level of profitability?

“Do you want me in the office crunching numbers or our selling?” the sales team asks. It’s a great question. Who in their right mind would leave this analysis up to the sales team? But it happens every day of the week.

Technology is the answer to ensuring your promotional spending returns BOTH the volume performance you desire and the profitability you need. 

Place

All can agree that sales success is about the right product in the right place, time, and price. 

If this is true (and it most certainly is), then why are most salespeople allowed to run willy-nilly throughout the market armed with nothing more than their own intuition to guide them in the accounts they choose to target? 

But it gets much worse. Most sales leaders urge their people to call on as many accounts as possible each week, acting under the grossly misguided belief that more sales calls equals more sales. 

This reckless disregard for the Pareto Principle is the norm for most sales organizations in our industry. This more-is-more approach is the single largest reason most wine and spirits companies aren’t consistently achieving their sales goals.

What is needed is a much more empirical approach. One that is driven by data. The data will tell you where to hunt. The key to high levels of sales performance is a disciplined adherence to the 80/20 Rule.

In fact, according to the 80/20/30 rule (found in Jeff Thull’s masterpiece, Mastering the Complex Sale), any time spent in the bottom third of the account base is guaranteed to cut your sales potential in half. HALF! 

So, technology comes to the rescue in two ways:

1. The data is used to identify the richest target accounts in any given sales territory.
2. The disciplined use of a CRM system to manage the opportunity pipeline and provide a clear line of sight to it.

Place is not just important; it’s paramount! And only technology and data can unlock the highest levels of sales performance.

People

Ask most salespeople what the #1 key to sales success is; they will tell you, without exception, “relationships.” 

But things quickly start to break down when asked about the best way to manage and foster relationships.

It is tragic but true: too many salespeople are hired based on their personality and charm—essential traits, to be sure. But what separates the exceptional performers from the rest of the pack is their ability to provide flawless follow-up to their customers. To these sales superstars, details matter.

Most salespeople resist using CRM because they think it’s a waste of time and too big-brother-ish. But the best salespeople embrace it because it enables them to

• Make more efficient use of their time (every salesperson’s most valuable asset).
• Close more sales faster.
• Close bigger deals.
• Eliminate written call reports.
• Improve retention of the placements they’ve worked so hard to achieve.
• Provide superior customer service.
• Crush their sales goals and cash bigger bonus checks.
• Automate, reduce, or eliminate manual repetitive administrative tasks.

Don't blame the CRM system if you are struggling with adopting CRM in your sales organization. 

The “People” part of the 5 Ps isn’t just about the people making purchase decisions; it’s about the people you have on your sales team. And that includes your sales leaders. 

Wine and spirits companies that consistently achieve their sales goals leverage technology in their sales processes and hire people who know how to use these systems and see value in them. 

Top salespeople want CRM. It empowers them. They embrace it. They leverage it. 

The “Sexiness” of Technology is in the Eye of the Beholder

Everyone who’s read this article faces two critical choices:

1. Continue to embrace a product-focused approach to sales
2. Learn to love and leverage data and technology to accelerate your sales in a disciplined way. 

Times have changed in this industry. In many ways. You can run with the big dogs or get up on the porch with the puppies.

Consistently nailing your sales and profitability goals is completely within your grasp. But it requires the tech chops to do it. 

Need help? We don’t produce wine or spirits, but we sure know how to sell them. Click here to schedule an appointment to talk with one of our sales technology experts.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/breaking-spell-why-your-product-isnt-enough-how-technology-lni7c/ 

Wine and spirits distributors do not always get full credit for their myriad of services offered. 

With portfolios bursting at the seams, their role in the 3-tier system is difficult. We at Andavi Solutions would like to recognize some of the critical functions distributors perform on behalf of their supplier partners. 

1) Training and Education

Distributor sales teams include some of the most highly trained professionals in the industry.

The training opportunities distributors provide are not solely for internal stakeholders. They also play a critical role in the education and training of their supplier partners. 

It is sad but true to say that many brand owners do not properly train their people, and by default, distributors end up picking up the slack.

Another vital area of training distributors provide is forecasting and inventory management (more on this below). 

Distributors do a lot of staff training (far more than most suppliers), and they don’t always get due credit for these efforts. The tools exist, however, to bring perfect visibility to all of this activity! 

As a side note: Legal issues are one of the most glaring gaps in education distributors provide to their supplier partners. Many suppliers do not know the laws of each state as well as they should. This often results in supplier representatives saying and doing things that violate the law. 

2) Market Analysis and Insights

Distributors possess significant information about the markets they service, especially regarding what sells and what doesn’t. 

They often find themselves needing to temper suppliers' expectations around what kind of growth potential exists for each product category, price tier, and trade channel.

Suppliers everywhere would do well to listen to and heed this guidance to collaborate with their distributors more effectively. 

Trends come and go, but rest assured, the distributor is typically the best and, sadly, most ignored resource for accurate market and category insights suppliers need to reach their sales goals. 

3) B2B eCommerce and Online Supplier services

In the last five to six years, distributors have made significant leaps in their ability to manage “the long tail” of distribution more efficiently, and more and more, this requires a digital approach.

Here are just a few of the areas where distributors meet the demand for digital B2B services:

• Online ordering platforms allow customers (retailers, restaurants, and bars) to place orders online. 
• eCommerce integrations: many wholesalers integrate their digital ordering platforms with their customers’ eCommerce systems and provide accurate product listings and pricing on their websites.
• Mobile apps: enable order replenishment, product availability, and notifications about promotions and new arrivals.
• Supplier portals: These portals enable access to sales data, monitor inventory levels, and collaborate on marketing initiatives and promotions.
• CRM and Customer Support: Many distributors use CRM systems to manage customer and supplier partner interactions. They are often willing to share the data from these tools if the Supplier has the means to ingest it.
• Compliance and Regulatory Tools: Distributors may provide tools to help customers and suppliers comply with various regulatory requirements such as labeling, tax reporting, and alcohol distribution laws.
• Digital Marketing Support: Distributors often assist supplier partners with digital marketing initiatives, including social media campaigns, email marketing, and online promotions to help boost product visibility and sales.
• Order Tracking and Delivery Notifications: To keep customers informed about the status of their orders and expected delivery times. 

By offering these digital B2B services, wine and spirits wholesalers aim to enhance efficiency, improve customer satisfaction, and strengthen their relationships with customers and suppliers in the competitive beverage distribution industry.

4) Inventory Management

Distributors utilize sophisticated inventory management systems to manage stock levels. These systems can also provide insights into product trends and purchasing patterns.

A surprising number of supplier partners do not fully utilize their distributors' capabilities in this area. Or worse, they ignore the distributors' guidance on how to help them keep their inventory as low as possible while eliminating out-of-stock situations at their warehouses. Instead, supplier partners insist on large shipment volumes to make fiscal numbers and provide large deal incentives to do so, introducing drastic inefficiency and cost into the system.

Supplier partners should regularly schedule brief check-in meetings to review key data points such as days on hand, daily rate of sale, and recommended orders. The ideal cadence would be to hold these brief meetings monthly or, at a minimum, once per quarter.

5) Supporting Under-represented Brand Owners

Most distributors place a very high value on DEI internally and externally. 

One of the ways this priority is manifested is in how distributors go out of their way to make room in their book for the diversity of owners (especially startup brands) looking to gain access to diverse audiences. 

A shining example of this is the Republic National Distributing Company. RNDC actively seeks to support underrepresented brand owners and vigorously pursues and supports associations like Diverse Powered Brands. 

In general, distributors seek to make a difference in supporting Black-owned, minority-owned, and women-owned producers looking to scale their brands. 

6) Strategic Partnerships

Wine and spirits distributors often form strategic partnerships with various entities to aid supplier partners and improve distribution networks.

These strategic partnerships cover a wide array, including:

• State-level retailer and restaurant associations
• Trade groups
• Technology providers
• Marketing and promotion agencies
• Industry research groups
• Colleges and universities

These partnerships are essential for ensuring that wine and spirits wholesalers can effectively distribute their supplier partners' products to a wide range of customers while staying competitive in a constantly evolving market.

7) Doing Good in Their Communities

Most distributors actively raise money for various local and national charities and directly donate to them.

For example, Empire Merchants in New York contributes products and monetary donations to more than eight charitable organizations, including hospitals, youth organizations, food banks, and LGBTQ foundations. 

Another area of philanthropy that distributors engage in is providing various scholarship opportunities. 

In 2023, RNDC raised over $1 million in support for the Prostate Cancer Foundation!

8) Multi-state Partnerships

Most suppliers are certainly aware of the coverage and reach of the largest national distributor companies. But, not all understand and appreciate the vast array of distributors that offer multi-state partnerships on a smaller scale.

The benefits to suppliers and brands of these multi-state wholesale companies are many, including:

• Market access
• Efficient distribution
• Expertise and resources
• Regulatory compliance
• Negotiating power
• Cost savings
• Scale and volume
• Portfolio synergy
• National and international expansion
• Financial stability

It's important to note that while there are clear advantages to working with large, multi-state wholesale companies, there are also considerations such as contractual agreements, fees, and competition for attention within their portfolios. 

Careful selection and management of distributor partnerships are crucial for maximizing the benefits and achieving your brand's goals in the wine and spirits industry.

9) Championing Small, Emerging Brands

More and more distributors are looking for ways to support the smaller, emerging brands. They instinctively understand that today’s emerging brands are tomorrow’s “mega-brands.”

They offer guidance and mentoring to brands they see as having enormous potential. They simply cannot accommodate every new brand that pops up on the scene, but they do their best to put processes in place to evaluate and “vet” new brands entering the already crowded supplier landscape.

One way this takes shape is the development of new selling divisions created specifically for small, emerging brands. 

Another service many distributors provide is an online portal where new brands can apply online (submit their proposals for consideration).

Different distributors offer support and services for new brands looking to enter their market. These online application processes make it easier for new brands to get started. 

10) Improving Efficiency and Streamlining the Supply Chain

Tremendous investments have been made in platforms, infrastructure, and systems to automate and streamline the supply chain. All tiers benefit from these high-tech tools, but too few suppliers know they exist.

Given the ongoing supply chain disruptions in bottling, importing, warehousing, and shipping, distributors' efforts to improve these systems should be celebrated. 

Some of these new systems include:

• Partnerships with transportation companies
• Planning and procurement software
• Improved analytics tools enable better forecasting
• More transparency in communication between tiers
• Warehouse visibility

Because alcohol must adhere to strict compliance policies, the distributor tier is uniquely positioned to assist its supplier partners with these potential disruptions in the supply chain. 

11) Data Collaboration

The wine and spirits industry increasingly uses big data from various sources to make more informed decisions.

America's wholesalers are sitting on mounds of data, and most are beginning to make this data more actionable for their supplier partners.

Suppliers can better understand and leverage their distributors' data by leveraging integrated software solutions like BevPath.

The current technology exists to bring your entire distribution team to the table!

12) Brand Promotion Assistance

Today, distributor capabilities regarding email marketing, social media, and graphic design are more sophisticated than ever. But, it’s surprising how few supplier partners avail themselves of these high-tech services.

These services are provided by small and large distributors alike. Most boast a state-of-the-art graphic design department and experienced merchandising professionals who help their suppliers create custom marketing campaigns and materials that help their brands stand out in a crowded marketplace.

But despite this widespread support from distributors of all sizes, stories abound about distributors dragging their suppliers, kicking and screaming, to utilize their tools and resources like:

• Wine and cocktail menu printing
• Market-specific point-of-sale materials
• Access to and involvement in high-exposure events like rodeos, wine festivals, auctions, and trade shows.

Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due

There are certainly more than twelve ways distributors can and do support their supplier partners! It often goes unnoticed because so much of it occurs behind the scenes. 

Andavi Solutions is fortunate to have clients operating in multiple tiers of the industry, and we are eager to continue enabling the players in those tiers to work together ever more effectively.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/12-things-distributors-do-supplier-partners-dont-always-w70sc/

With finance endlessly hunting and pecking for data while sales scrambles for approvals on their ‘gut’ guess for the best pricing models and incentives with a distributor, it’s no wonder that planning and executing successful promotions are often a WAG.

The problem is – while you can get lucky or play mediocre odds on accidental wins, only accessible data, accurate numbers, visibility into performance, and the ability to execute quickly in the market can help you turn the dials on consistent, repeatable profitability through promotions.

It’s time to implement and execute on the Three in Three rule.

What is the Three in Three rule exactly? It’s a tried and true, simple, three-step looped approach to promotions in the three-tier wine industry:

• Track
• Plan
• Automate.  

To elaborate, this means, you need to:

• Centralize and govern collecting the outcomes of absolutely trade programs and promotions, such as by-the-glass (BTG), depletion allowances (DA’s), free goods, incentives, and samples. (Track).
• Use the tracked performance data from above to create profitable promotional models at any level from the most comprehensive view of your trade program performance. (Plan).
• Auto approve promotions and pricing incentives for sales to submit and activate anywhere while working with distributors. (Automate).

Chances are your current pricing systems, manual processes, and Excel spreadsheets don’t allow you to execute on Three in Three easily or effectively. After all, this proven, circular triad approach hinges on technology that enables centralized, governed, and accessible data.  

So, how can you get started? Check out Tradeparency.

See a full demo of our full-cycle trade management solution on-demand:

WATCH THE DEMO NOW

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.

Are your three-tier pricing management tools and processes giving you the ability to price your wine and evaluate trade spending correctly? After all, tracking, optimizing, automating, and reporting on all your DAs, trade spending, and promotions is how you’ll stay competitive, protect your brand, and ensure a healthy bottom line.

To help you determine if your workflows, infrastructure, or governance allow for efficient and profitable pricing management, Tradeparency’s industry data experts compiled 9 initial questions to ask and answer internally.  

These will help you reveal where you may have gaps in the complete cycle of your pricing management or what could be preventing you from pricing for profit effectively in the three-tier market:

1. How do you track and analyze approved deals by product, date, region, or distributor?
2. Can your sales managers access price grid reports on-demand?
3. What is your process for handling exception-based managerial approval of new deals?
4. Do your current pricing tools base depletion allowances and chargeback invoice reconciliations off third-party depletion numbers only? Are you able to reconcile against actual approved deals and invoices?
5. Do you have tools that integrate seamlessly to cover everything in the cycle of trade promotion management, not just pricing alone? For example, claims/collection, accounting, reporting/analysis, and promotional planning?
6. Are you able to support and enforce supplier-controlled billback pricing versus only distributor-to-supplier-controlled billback pricing?
7. How do you track and execute pulse deals?
8. What is your workflow for approving deals? What is manual in this workflow versus automated?
9. Are your trade/pricing management tools and processes integrated with your ERP or accounting system so you can work with common codes, invoices, credit memos, etc.?

Once you have rough answers to these questions, you can begin building a clearer picture of your organization’s pricing management and recognize any inefficiencies or identify opportunities that can significantly boost financial, brand, and operational performance.

To expand further on this exercise, download Tradeparency’s free Evaluation Checklist for Wine Pricing Management Software. It includes a self-service guide to appraising various pricing management processes and tools in your winery or import business to match your needs.

Once you’ve gone through the internal exercise with the questions above, you can take the checklist for a spin in a no-cost, personalized Tradeparency demo.

SCHEDULE A DEMO NOW

The changing landscape of sales

Nearly every advancement in professional selling is due to the use of technology. When you fold in the rapid evolution of consumer behavior - such as independent online research and social media - you have a perfect storm that will leave most salespeople bobbing precariously in the wake of forward progress. 

This article is intended as a wake-up call to all sales professionals in our industry. Salespeople who are comfortable with and proficient in using digital tools will reap significant advantages compared to “traditional” salespeople.

The reward for the tech-savvy includes higher productivity and better customer insights. Adaptability is an attribute that will become increasingly prized as time goes on.

Traditional versus modern sales methods

Historically, most salespeople rely on ‘traditional’ means of selling. We are all familiar with these common methods, such as:

• Face-to-face appointments with samples in tow
• Phone calls and text messages
• Selecting target accounts by “intuition” and gut feel (instead of hard data)
• Sales by volume approach (instead of leveraging 80/20)

But this “analog” method of operating simply won’t cut it as we move into 2024. It’s become too competitive!

While not entirely bad, these methods are extremely limiting. What sales leader or business owner would intentionally put an inefficient, ineffective sales team on the field?

The fatal weakness of wine & spirits selling

While it might appear we are being melodramatic here, there is indeed a fatal weakness, and it is this:

Being overly obsessed with the product itself

There it is. We said it out loud. 

Everyone reading this article knows exactly what we are talking about here. The focus on the product (how it was made, who made it, what it tastes like, etc) is intrinsically inseparable from the sales process. 

We’d go so far as to say some people cannot sell wine or spirits any other way. 

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach, it does have two fatal flaws:

1. It is not very efficient
2. It is not scaleable,

Sales success in the future will depend on leveraging the use of technology.

The gap is growing!

Before diving into the specifics of how to leap into the future, let’s briefly touch on this important observation: the gap between ‘analog’ selling and ‘tech-enabled’ selling is growing fast.

Worth noting here is we are not advocating to stop face-to-face selling completely but rather augmenting it.  

When it comes down to it, there are only two ‘assets’ every salesperson possesses: their time and the goodwill of their customers.

Sales success is highly dependent upon the efficient use of time. Time is precious, but it is also leverageable. 

This concept of ‘leverage’ is mission-critical. Doing more with less. Being ruthless in using one's time is the key to accelerating sales success. We love this quote from The 4-Hour Workweek: “Being busy is a form of laziness - lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing and is far more unpleasant.”

Heading into 2024 and beyond, there are nine things every wine and spirits salesperson will need to know:

1. Expert use of CRM

CRM is the perfect tool for salespeople who want to achieve outstanding sales results. Effective use of CRM empowers salespeople to sell more. 

The core functionality of CRM has four key benefits for salespeople:

1. It saves precious time
2. It allows documentation and visibility of communication and simplifies prospecting
3. It helps to streamline the sales into a repeatable process
4. It dramatically improves customer retention

In the right hands and with the right training, CRM does not replace sales efforts; it enhances them.

One of the most practical things you can do is learn more about how CRM helps salespeople sell more effectively. 

2. Social Selling

Today, too many salespeople see social media as the realm of influencer marketing and obsessive self-aggrandizement. Most never consider what a powerful prospecting tool social media can be. It can also be a mighty force for building relationships at scale.

Social selling (also known as ‘virtual selling’ or ‘digital selling’) has evolved from using social media as we have typically come to view it. 

Social selling is about unlocking an entire digital ecosystem, one that can amplify and augment a person’s sales efforts.

Take LinkedIn, for example. LinkedIn is not just a platform for the unemployed. It has become one of the most powerful networking and prospecting tools on the planet.

A complete, well-curated presence on LinkedIn becomes a strategic method for sellers to connect and build relationships with prospects.

Actively engaging with prospects on LinkedIn is an effective way to develop connections, build trust, and develop impactful relationships.

3. Basic category management

Category management is not solely reserved for selling in the off-premise trade channel. 

The efficient use of resources is at the core of sound category management principles, and this concept naturally applies to on-premise.

Modern, tech-savvy salespeople understand the importance of going well beyond product knowledge by leveraging data and trends to serve customers better. 

Now more than ever, restaurants and retailers must figure out how to do more with less. When salespeople primarily focus on how a product tastes, how it was made, and the story behind it who made it they fall far short of what the restaurant or retailer truly needs: how to grow revenue, control costs, and improve guest satisfaction.

Objective, data-driven business decisions should be prized just as highly as product knowledge certifications if sellers seek to add value to the accounts they serve.

While full-blown category management skills can be complex and intimidating, the basics need not be. Every salesperson worth their salt should understand SKU rationalization, assortment, inventory turns, sales mix, and market share. 

4. Key account targeting

For a typical salesperson, the thrill of the hunt is what drives them. If a customer is not using their product, they feel it’s their job to get in there and close that account. 

Most hiring managers look for this quality when selecting candidates for a sales position. The problem is that sales results will always fall short of the potential unless those client acquisition skills are augmented by a data-driven approach to targeting the right accounts.

In reality, most salespeople do not always act in the company's best interest (let alone their own best interests). Restricting sales activity and investment to only the most attractive and responsive accounts takes a great deal of discipline. 

Not all accounts are of equal value. The key to accelerating sales performance is to stay focused on the 20% of the accounts that can drive 80% of the volume. 

Modern sales pros must possess the skills to identify the most important accounts to target. They must learn which attributes of an account contribute to high levels of depletion, put in the research, and then target those precise accounts.

This less-is-more approach is essential to gaining the most sales with the least amount of effort and time expenditure. 

Wine & spirits brands must use a strategic, empirical approach to account selection if they hope to achieve their sales goals. 

5. Data-driven sales approach

Data objectively points to the opportunities. Data will show sales teams where to aim their resources and efforts. Data will also help sellers to better understand and serve their buyers. 

Today’s buyers have much higher expectations of sellers than ever, and sellers must be well-equipped and trained to meet these expectations. 

A data-driven sales approach is the only way to truly help customers achieve their goals. Responding to these elevated expectations requires analytics.

The pandemic surely accelerated the shift towards a more data-driven sales approach but there is no doubt that the need for these skills will only continue to be critical for sales success in the wine & spirits industry. 

According to Salesforce.com, 80% of business buyers expect to do more business online than ever before. We invite you to learn more about how other adult beverage companies use their data to unlock business intelligence.

6. How to leverage AI

To say that AI has the potential to revolutionize the wine & spirits industry is a huge understatement. AI can help improve many facets of sales and marketing. 

If our industry has been slow to adopt and leverage AI capabilities, it’s even more true among sales professionals. Tech-savvy beverage producers use AI to:

• Predict customer behavior
• Analyze data
• Identify cross-selling and upsell opportunities
• Automate repetitive tasks
• Improve the accuracy of forecasting
• Gathering information from multiple sources

Human sales skills like relationship building and storytelling will always remain crucial to sales success. However, all sales teams must seek to leverage AI for no other reason than to increase productivity. 

Central to leveraging AI in sales is providing your sales team with just the right information and tools to close more deals. 

A great way to start the process of incorporating AI into your sales process is to figure out which aspects of your sales processes can be simplified or optimized. From this point, you can explore and identify just the right tools for your sales team. 

A great example of this is the automated management of pricing. Tools like Pricing Gateway exist now that simplify the three-tier pricing process by providing collection, aggregation, and reporting of distributor pricing for the beverage industry.  

7. Use Email marketing platforms to enhance trade sales

Sales teams of tomorrow must move beyond one-to-one email tools like Outlook and Gmail. Automated platforms like Pardot, MailChimp, and Klavio offer targeted trade email campaigns and lead management. 

A trade-only email list of buyers is essential to managing buyer relationships at scale. Modern sellers need to know how to grow and maintain their trade-only email lists. 

For example, consider adding a popup that appears when people visit the Trade section of your website inviting them to join your trade-only email list. You can then set up an automated welcome email and a series of “nurture” emails that add value to your subscribers. This is less about selling and more about serving. 

Email automation platforms can greatly enhance your communications with your distributor partners as well. 

And if you have not yet grabbed your copy of The 3-Tier Survival Guide for Wine & Spirits, now is the time! 

You can also find inspiration from articles like this that show how to use email marketing to attract trade buyers. 

“Modern” email automation is not about newsletters and “blasts” to everyone on your list. It’s about building one-to-one relationships AT SCALE!

8. Inbound lead generation

One of the most powerful and effective ways to grow your trade-only email list and gain new buyer contacts is to practice inbound marketing.

Central to inbound marketing principles is the use of lead magnets. Lead magnets are valuable, digital content that you give away in exchange for a buyer’s contact information. These might include:

• E-books
• White papers
• Videos
• How-to guides
• Research 
• Webinars

Outbound digital sales strategies are time-consuming and often ineffective. Inbound strategies can be fully automated and allow even the smallest sales team to box above their weight class. 

Wineries, distilleries, breweries, and even distributors can leverage inbound sales strategies to not only dramatically increase their trade-only email list but also ‘serve’ their trade audiences. 

A great example of this is hosting “gated content” on your website such as case studies,  white papers, and how-to guides. 

Highly informative webinars are a fantastic way to attract and grow your trade-only audience. When thinking about what topics to use for webinars, it is vital sales teams take off their sales hats and instead don their industry-expert hat. Think about what problems your buyers have and how you can help solve those problems. People do not like to be sold but they love to learn. 

Lead generation is and has always been used to supercharge a sales team’s efforts but much less so in the wine & spirits industry. Now is the time to get on board and get the training you need to leverage this powerful sales strategy!

9. Trade spend management

Imagine being able to track all of your promotions such as by-the-glass spending, depletion allowances, free goods, incentives, and samples in one powerful tool.

Sales teams of the future will dispense with time-consuming manual processes and spreadsheets to manage trade spending in favor of powerful software tools that tie together sales, finance, and IT teams into one central process.

The ability to quickly and accurately analyze the ROI of your trade spending is something all “modern” sellers can enjoy. 

How much did your last BTG program cost? Was the spend worth it? Did I have the optimal price for both the restaurant and the distributor? These are critical questions that cannot be left to Excel spreadsheets!

Thanks to modern technology, visibility, and control of all aspects of your trade spending can be at your fingertips. This should include the management of your pricing, powerful, intuitive reports, and insightful, predictive analytics. 

Only tech-savvy salespeople need apply

More and more job descriptions for sales roles include requirements for proficiency in using digital sales tools and strategies. 

The adaptation of technology is no longer a nice-to-have but a must-have feature of a modern sales team. And why shouldn’t they be? Higher productivity and better engagement are the rewards of adopting digital selling strategies!

Digital selling strategies of the future are not just for the DTC channel. They are desperately needed in the 3-tier realm as well! 

Sales roles are evolving quickly and we at Andavi do not want anyone to get left behind. 

Is YOUR sales team up to snuff? Do you need guidance, support, and training? We’re here to help! 

About Andavi Solutions

Andavi Solutions was built to offer beverage alcohol businesses an integrated suite of technology solutions that provide insights, drive superior decision-making, and deliver ROI across the value chain. With decades of experience as suppliers, distributors, and analysts, Andavi Solutions has successfully leveraged technology to support the deliverables of on-premise chain accounts.

Want to learn even more about how we can help you succeed in on-premise chains? Contact us here for more information.

Do you have the complete picture of your trade spending? Suppose you’re basing promotion costs off depletion allowances only, or you’ve fallen into one or more of the common traps listed below. In that case, you’re likely losing visibility over a shockingly large portion of the expenses.

In the end, that means you don’t truly know how much your wine margins are or if it’s even profitable. Without an accurate breakdown and proper understanding of the actual spend, you miss the opportunity to adjust pricing, plan promotions, or make moves that will turn the dials in your bottom line and brand’s favor.

These are the most common mistakes three-tier wineries and import businesses make with wine pricing and expenses:

• The cost of samples isn’t being accounted for
• Sales incentives aren’t included in costing and spend calculations
• Promotion expense types are being bundled
• Controlled promotional programs aren’t being tracked properly
• Expense buckets are in a completely separate, non-integrated system
• Non-distributor vendors have no attributed expenditures against them
• Pricing and promotions management isn’t integrated with your central ERP
• When meeting with distributors, sales doesn’t have access to promotional data

But the remedy to one or all of these isn’t complicated. You can start today by reading Tradeparency’s full article:  Beyond Depletion Allowance: The Top 8 Mistakes Wineries Make With Pricing Management. 

Last year saw a rocky start to the import wine business. Thanks to the Boeing vs. European-subsidized Airbus battle, enormous tariffs on European wine were all but imminent. Once defeated (thanks to intense lobbying efforts), restaurants around the country began to shut down and on-premise sales came to a halt. In 2020, importers couldn’t catch a break.

Still, as restaurant sales rebound and portfolios are adjusted, those in the wine import business always have challenges as they work two sides of the import coin—suppliers and distributors. Processing billbacks on the distributor side and managing commissions on the supplier side, all while trying to promote and price products with adequate margin in the market, is a feat. In addition, many importers realize lost profits and are forced to provide slow customer service as they just try to reconcile everything from inefficient and error-prone disparate systems, spreadsheets, and deal tracking practices.

But it isn’t all dismal.

Tradeparency is a one-of-its-kind trade management platform aimed at solving the unique pricing, promotion, and margin obstacles importers face every day. Not only does Tradeparency automate billbacks and commissions based on real data, but it also manages multiple FOBs, brands, and suppliers in a centralized platform.

Click here to learn more about Tradeparency and how it transforms business management for importers when they need it the most.

The evolution of consumer tastes over the last decade has spawned an explosion of brands – beer, wine and spirits – resulting in an already crowded field becoming nearly unmanageable without some kind of technology. Plus, as the competition grows fiercer. Producers are becoming more reliant on their distributors to play a more prominent role in the sales process. It is for this reason that forward thinking distributors are now realizing the benefits yielded using technology to aid in the execution of sales strategies dictated by the suppliers they serve. Here’s some information on why the need has grown so acute for solutions to this business challenge and how contemporary solutions are helping distributors play a stepped up role in the sales process. First, the “why” the need has grown.

As the beverage industry grows increasingly diversified, there are simply too many moving parts to be managed casually. These days, it’s not uncommon for a large supplier to own 20 brands. Should the supplier develop, say, five strategic initiatives to execute per brand/per quarter that translates to 100 different executable programs (each with its own performance indicators or ‘KPIs’ to be tracked) per quarter or 400 for the entire year!  Multiply the number of initiatives by the number of accounts a sales rep services and the number of KPIs to be executed and managed by a single salesperson easily grows to more than 2,000 per year!

As distributors are pressed into service in this way. Suppliers are demanding their distributors take steps to assure accountability. But don’t imagine for a moment that distributors are adopting technology like GreatVines under duress or less-than-willingly. For most distributors, there is a well-documented need to optimize the strength and effectiveness of their portfolios involving all their suppliers. With niche products/brands finding ways to penetrate the market effectively. Distributors are hungry for any tools they can use to protect their innate advantage. Tools to help drive sales by exploiting leading indicators are very attractive to distributors.

Next, let’s examine how distributors are leveraging technology tools according to contemporary best practices. Much like their suppliers, distributors are finding tools like GreatVines invaluable for a number of reasons. First and foremost, technology solutions provide processes and methodologies. Built into their applications, which are flexible enough to manage the disparate needs of a wide array of product lines. The processes, which are replicable and even more importantly, scalable, provide improved control over workflows. Through permissions/approvals and allow the enforcement of KPIs for trade spend budgets. Plus, being cloud-based and designed for use on mobile devices all salespeople rely on today, these tools enable collaboration in real time. They’re perfect for keeping sales forces in the field informed, up to the minute, on all relevant measures of success. Meanwhile, management gets timely reporting and improved control over strategies and correlated spend.

With the right tools and processes in place, distributors are seeing increased sales volumes. This in turn supports stronger, more positive relationships with the suppliers/producers and healthier, more consistent brand management. For more detailed information on the positive effects of technology solutions for distributors. You should read GreatVines newest white paper on this very subject.  It’s called, Why Distributors Need a Solution to Execute their Suppliers Leading Indicators (KPIs). It is available for download on the sidebar of this article.

The three-tier system is filled with challenges like regulatory compliances, multi-level pricing structure, and data integration that highlights your sales teams’ efforts. Your pricing solution shouldn’t be one of these challenges to overcome. That’s why we designed Tradeparency to solve your pricing structure and promotion needs and do it all with exceptional capabilities, all at your digital fingertips. 

If you’re looking to solve your Price 2.0 challenges, here are 5 reasons why Tradeparency excels:

1.  Simple tool for anyone to use 

Choosing a solution can be hard, but getting your team to use it is always harder. We make sure that Tradeparency is simple, intuitive, and easy to use. Not only do we help train your staff, but we make sure you have the support you need, when you need it. You won’t have frustrated team members when using an intuitive solution, and user adoption will remain high when everyone sees the value of efficiencies in Tradeparency.

2. Industry experience matters – Wine & Spirits included

Between by-the-glass pricing, menu incentives, and depletion allowance matching, nobody knows your business better than you, but we understand the industry. Our Wine and Spirits experienced team delivers real insights, industry-leading solutions, and pricing language that matters to you. We’ve worked for decades in the industry just like your teams, so we won’t ignore the important features and key tools that matter for your business. Stop working within the confines of software that’s designed for the beer industry and start working with one that is designed for your business. 

3. Distributor Authoritarian on Pricing with Price 2.0

Your pricing strategy and discussions are key factors in your success. That’s why you shouldn’t rely on one source of truth for all your pricing data and strategy. With Price 2.0, your distributors tell YOU how to price your products, not the other way around. This means not having control on the pricing of your products or approving bill backs that you may or may not have validated or would have approved. Tradeparency lets you control your pricing structure and bill backs with automatic validation and alerts when your pricing doesn’t match your invoices.

4. Just Having Pricing doesn’t do the Policing – Ensure Compliance with your Pricing

Do you know how much you actually spent on a promotions program? Are your invoices showing you the true efforts and effectiveness of your distributors? A key measurement of sales success like this shouldn’t be only told to you by the distributor. Having visibility to the spending in each market will allow for better planning and control over future spending.  

5. Gross-to-Net Coverage – Invoicing control and consolidation

One of the most time-consuming aspects of pricing is consolidating and reconciling your invoices compared to your bill-backs. Tradeparency removes this challenge for you by automating the reconciliation part of this crucial process with alerts and checkpoints to ensure you aren’t overpaying and spending hours reconciling your invoices. Plus, it allows you to actually SEE the effectiveness and success of your programs With all your supported pricing inside of Tradeparency, you can quickly identify if Distributors are submitting invoices on unapproved or even ended bill-backs. It also allows for you to quickly pull the unsupported bill-back from invoices to communicate with Distributors. Keeps your invoices clear, organized and accurate with Tradeparency.

With Tradeparency, give your team time back to truly strategize on pricing, see the work your team can do with our intuitive system, find the money you could be overpaying, all in a system designed for your business. Start using Tradeparency for the best ROI you can find today.

Want to learn more? Click here or schedule a demo with one of our team members today!

The fear of alienating one’s customers is warranted, considering AI-suggested ad copy tends to feel like a supermarket birthday cake: the tepid intersection of everyone’s tastes, perfectly inoffensive and underwhelming, pleasant but forgettable. In Wine & Spirits especially, it’s tempting to treat AI’s role in our marketing output like a zero sum game: a choice between efficiency or meaning, novelty or tradition, quantity or quality, transaction or connection. 

Fortunately—with the right approach—it’s actually not all that difficult to retain one’s soul despite dramatically improving one’s productivity in any role. While this does sound like something Chat GPT would write (looking at you, em dashes)—well, there’s nothing I can say to convince you I’m human right now, is there? On second thought, maybe it’s best to just read on.

It’s Worth It.

Used judiciously, AI is the great equalizer. Where small businesses truly had little hope of accomplishing as much as larger teams before, a resourceful startup can now run circles around inefficient, bureaucratic, do-everything-by-committee corporations.

It’s tempting as an up-and-coming wine or spirits brand to feel hopelessly outgunned by the old guard in terms of the resources they’re able to muster (like the distributor’s attention, for starters). In our daydreams of success, we tend to mythologize and even emulate those at the top. Ask an actual employee at one of the largest suppliers how they deploy their giant budgets so carefully, and they may have trouble stifling their laughter. 

Robots Hate This Simple Trick

...Read the full article here

by Sarah Nagle

by Sarah Nagle

by Sarah Nagle 

Depending on your wine or spirits brand, the cocktail of channels you depend upon to drive volume in 2025 may look different than it did five years ago. You might lean more heavily upon E-Premise and Direct to Consumer sales. Still, nothing moves cases like a placement in strategic national accounts, regional chains, and high-volume independents in the right markets.

The natural consequence of devoting more attention to emerging channels is less time to devote to traditional 3-tier sales strategy without investing in more resources. Under these constraints, it’s more important than ever to focus your team’s efforts in the market with a well-researched, highly-targeted plan of attack. 

A crucial roadmap resulting from this research is a Key Account Target (KAT) list. By selecting the accounts capable of driving the most volume for your brand and focusing your sales team’s time and efforts — to the neglect of the rest of your available account universe — in those key accounts, you’re more likely to outperform the market and your competitors.

Fortunately, the common traits that characterize high volume accounts are not mysterious if you know what to look for; they’re just not necessarily intuitive either. Drawing upon our collective experience as an industry-leading provider of sales execution solutions for some of the largest wine & spirits brands in the world, here are 5 indicators of high volume in on-premise accounts to seek out when building your own key account target lists in 2025.

1. Fit (For Your Brand/Product/Customer in Particular)

While not an indicator of high volume in its own right, “fit” is every account relationship’s prerequisite for high volume. It must come first. Aside from hurting your brand equity, a mismatched placement in an otherwise high volume account could mean negligible volume and wasted resources for your winery or distillery. 

An account that fits the other criteria on this list — say, a rooftop bar featuring live music — might drive a ton of volume for cocktail-friendly spirits brands, craft beer, and RTDs, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to sling your Sonoma Coast Pinot to college kids all night at $95/bottle. 

2. Private Parties / Event Space 

The adult beverage is the most frequently invited guest at everything from fundraising events to birthday parties, weddings, funerals, and more. It’s the reason so many get into this industry in the first place; beverages bring people together, through the best and worst of times. 

If you manage to land a by the glass placement or get on the cocktail list for one of these event menus, you're looking at pallets of reordering potential. Because these event menus are so tightly curated and offer so few options, your product has way fewer brands to compete with. That means the bourbon guy is going to order your pour every single time — he has no other choice!

Pay particular attention in your account research to the number of rooms a hotel has, as well as the square feet of meeting space available for corporate events, banquets, and the like. Getting on the room-service list or landing a banquet menu placement at the right hotel could mean the difference between selling all the wine you make or your inventory gathering dust at the distributor warehouse.

3. Outdoor Seating

Even if owners were willing to ignore fire code and capacity regulations, there’s only so much room inside a restaurant or bar to seat customers, and only so much revenue to squeeze from each guest without overserving them. That’s a little indelicate, perhaps, but this in part explains why venues with balconies, patios, and rooftop bars sell so much more than indoor-only venues. 

There’s another, more experiential side to this as well, though — especially in areas with nice weather or a scenic view, tourists and locals alike tend to linger and order more drinks. Look for accounts with multiple excuses for guests to extend their stay, like yard games, live music, trivia nights, and other well-promoted, scheduled attractions.

Bonus High-Volume Indicator: A Well-Loved Social Media Following & High-Quality Web Presence

This one almost goes without saying, but an account that’s not visible online may as well not exist unless they have some niche appeal with older or local demographics or some legendary word-of-mouth cult following. When someone sees that you have a large following, this acts as social proof; it’s the same effect as walking past a crowded restaurant and thinking, “wow, that place must be good.”

Today, you can find everything you need to assemble a high quality key account target list online using Google Places/Maps/Reviews and publications like Eater for even more niche, deep dives into particular markets.While Yelp is not as highly trafficked as it used to be, using filters for the highest number of reviews or (back to Google) searching specifics like “best cocktail bar in Denver” yields a surprising wealth of results for getting started.