Imagine your VP of Sales announcing they’ve ditched CRM for a Rolodex. Or your finance director saying Excel is too modern, so they’re switching to chalkboard.
And yet, here we are — 2025 — squinting at billbacks for hours on end and sending reps to visit every retail account like the entire industry is running for sheriff. Automation isn’t new, but for the wine & spirits world, it might as well be black magic.
We love to talk about efficiency, scaling, and modernizing — right up until someone proposes replacing busywork with bots. Suddenly, it’s “But our rep relationships!” or “This is how we’ve always done it.” As if nostalgia for manual labor is part of our brand identity.
Let’s get one thing straight: no one’s asking you to hand your label design to Midjourney or let ChatGPT pick your clones. We’re talking about automating the parts of your business that drain time, waste money, and offer zero competitive advantage.
You Wouldn’t Go Back to Washing Clothes by Hand
You’d think the realization would’ve dawned by now: humans are expensive. And using them to do repetitive, error-prone, low-leverage work is like hiring a Michelin-star chef to fold napkins.
AI-powered image recognition tools now exist that let field reps snap a photo of shelf space and instantly surface compliance issues, identify competitive SKUs, and recommend follow-up actions. Yet some teams still rely on anecdotal gut-checks and late-night email chains.
Invoice processing? Same story. AI Invoice Manager checks each distributor invoice against your deal terms in seconds — surfacing costly errors your spreadsheet wizard might miss entirely.
That’s not replacing your finance team — it’s liberating them to focus on pricing strategy, evaluate trade promotions for ROI, and make actual decisions. The stuff that grows your business long term.
Automation Isn’t the Enemy. Mindless Activity Is.
The real resistance to automation isn’t about jobs. It’s about ego.
Manual effort feels productive. It looks good in a “weekly activity report” meeting. That retail visit? You can see it. Log it. Count it. But did it move the needle?
The brands winning right now are doing less, on purpose. They’re filtering their account universe down to the few that matter, then using real-time data to align their activities with results.
They’re not chasing 100 new placements. They’re reinforcing the 10 that sell 80% of their volume. They’re not manually tracking promo performance in 40 Excel tabs; they’re using modern CRM dashboards that auto-sync with distributor depletions.
The Truth: Automation is Already Happening Under Your Competitor’s Roof.
If you’ve read this far, it’s likely we’re preaching to the choir. Pretend we’re not, though, and you’re someone who needs to hear the following:
Every week you delay automating a manual process, your competition gets faster, leaner, and more dangerous. They’re rerouting reps with AI-powered route planning. They’re answering customer surveys with image recognition. They’re sending automated nudges to distributor reps in underperforming accounts.
Yet here you are, overpaying for outdated data, wondering if it was “worth the investment. Meanwhile, nobody bats an eye at the hours of human labor you’re burning on work that should’ve been outsourced to silicon years ago.
Take a look at this bell curve from Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm. Which industries do you think belong in the “innovators” and “early adopters” categories for AI adoption?
There’s still good (albeit, back-handed) news. If your winery, brewery, or distillery isn’t automating the drudgery of doing business in our 3 tier system yet, you may still have time to join the early adopters nested securely within a card-carrying “laggard” of an industry.
Final Pour
Look, wine & spirits is a people business. Always will be. But your people shouldn’t be stuck doing machine work. Not when automation can free them to think bigger, act faster, and — here’s a wild idea — raise a glass with other people. Touch grass.
Change is tough, but you don’t have to endure it alone. Make your sales and finance teams more efficient with cutting edge AI and explore use cases specific to Beverage Alcohol during our free webinar on Wednesday, August 27th at 1pm EDT.
Click here to register so you don’t miss it! We’ll send you the recording even if you can’t make it.
by Sarah Nagle
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.
If you’re like me, the first thing you’ll think reading this title is “you can’t know that; people hit invisible targets by mistake all the time!” Touché. Can we move on, smart aleck? (Takes one to know one.)
A lot of wine and spirits brands are doing the professional equivalent of heading to the gun range blindfolded, with high hopes to grow their business year over year. The lunacy is less apparent only because the BevAlc business isn’t a matter of life and death—at least not what Peter Attia calls “fast death.”
We romanticize hustle: more accounts sold, more calls made, more activity. But activity without visibility isn’t strategy — it’s superstition.
Until recently, wine & spirits suppliers operated with a very limited view of what was happening on the ground: depletions delivered on a monthly basis, already outdated. Account-level insights? Rare. Shared priorities between supplier and distributor teams? Aligned in theory, but it’s mostly pageantry due to every distributor’s sheer lack of resources in the face of thousands and thousands of supplier partners.
That changes with BevPath.
For the first time, both sides of the 3-tier handshake can see the same field in near-real time: which accounts are driving lift, which actions correlate with volume, where by-the-glass placements are pulling weight — and where opportunity is gathering dust.
🎯 BevPath lets you:
- Sync supplier + distributor targets (finally)
- Share execution data in both directions
- Direct your reps’ efforts where ROI has demonstrably stemmed from those activities
Less guesswork. More alignment. Greater impact. Because if your team’s going to take the shot, you owe them a clear look at the target, at bare minimum.
Reach out to bevpath@andavisolutions.com to explore what BevPath could do for your sales this OND.
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!
🔍 What You’ll Learn in This White Paper:
💰 Why manual invoice reconciliation is costing BevAlc finance teams time and money
💰 The most common, costly mistakes even top finance teams miss
💰 How AI is transforming invoice validation for 3-Tier suppliers
💰 Real-time visibility, fewer errors, and faster reconciliation
💰 Proof of ROI: What real Tradeparency partners have saved
💰 Quick ROI checklist: Are you leaving money on the table?
Sign up here & we'll email you a free copy: https://lnkd.in/ggRtJJ-p
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
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.
With wineries practically betrothed to spreadsheets, early-2000s websites, and stodgy cursive fonts plucked straight from a Jane Austen character’s trembling hands, is it any surprise that our industry is behind in adopting useful AI tools with the capacity to make our businesses efficient and profitable?
Despite all appearances to the contrary, given that first paragraph – this isn’t another post trying to shame the industry into adapting. A well-connected bev alc professional need only scroll LinkedIn for about two seconds for a hearty dose of “stop complaining; this is your fault” novellas on the state of alcohol sales today.
No; the intent here is to empower you: to suggest that the AI tools available to us right now are not only developed enough, but so easily adoptable that taking action today might just be enough to usher you and your team into a sound night’s sleep for the first time since, perhaps, “the before times” pre-pandemic.
It would be foolish to keep operating the same way we did half a century ago. Adept as we are at agonizing over our own mortality, we somehow fail to apply the same existential urgency to our business practices in a world that changes very, very quickly.
Is it any surprise automation has failed to resonate with winemakers and distillers, careful stewards of ancient arts?
In Wine & Spirits, it makes sense that we struggle to relinquish control to artificial intelligence on the business end; so much of our focus in production is on uncompromising perfection, resisting anything that might threaten to dilute our creative vision.
Successful marketing practice, on the other hand, often entails split testing (A/B testing) multiple variations of creative, treating our own ideas as entirely disposable and entrusting the promotion of our precious products (read: our babies) to the publishing equivalent of a pump-action shotgun in the algorithm’s hands.
Hesitation Warranted; Help Wanted
Admittedly, AI’s usefulness is still very much emerging; there’s merit to questioning whether or not Chat GPT’s tenth-grade-essay bravado is really enough to strike deep resonance with your ideal customers.
On one side of the fence, certain hiring managers/recruiters take a “burn the fleet and never look back” approach to AI, rejecting every applicant who doesn’t seem to bow down and worship emerging technology as the only way forward.
Then, there are the experienced applicants, with an acute awareness of AI’s shortcomings in the shadow of their own skill set, keeping a close eye on new tools as potential competitors on one hand and a competitive advantage on the other.
The answer is to wield these tools judiciously; to stay up to date and agile, open to potential benefits without gulping down the panacea pill with both eyes shut.
So what’s the practical application here? How are wineries and distilleries already using AI tools to conduct business more efficiently and eliminate costly manual processes?
Chat GPT (and Comparable Generative AI Tools)
Let’s begin with the tool(s) most familiar to the masses. Without getting tangled in the weeds of every possibility out there, have a look at some practical and immediately accessible ways to apply Chat GPT and any image generator (dealer’s choice) to the work your team is already doing to grow your wine and/or spirits business today:
- Brainstorming Campaign Ideas – Now, this one assumes you are, in fact, running any campaigns at all promoting your business. This is one area where Chat GPT, with all of its copywriting shortcomings, really shines: brainstorming ideas for your team to take and develop further. Need a list of 50 lead magnet ideas? Choose your top 3-5 favorites and develop those into full blown pieces of content. Use your audience’s hopes and fears as a guide; which one of these AI-generated ideas is most likely to help my customer get what they want and become the person they want to be? How is it going to enrich their lives and lead to self-actualization? This is the part your AI colleague is going to need help with — empathy.
- Copywriting (to be refined by your team) – AI can provide a great springboard, or starting point for your email campaigns, ad copy, labels, product and collection descriptions for your website. With paid/premium versions of these tools, you can (and should) actually create a persona out of your little AI co-writer; give the tool a brief on who they are (as a stand-in employee) and feed it as many materials as you can on your brand; then, when it’s time for it to crank out an email campaign selling organic Chilean wines from your estate, it has an idea of what brand voice to use and which lines to color inside.
- Marketing images – Need an image for a blog post or LinkedIn article? A photo of a cocktail recipe you came up with, but haven’t actually — ever — made? It’s incredibly easy to save time normally spent searching for the right stock photo or creating (or paying an agency to create) an original piece of content. While this isn’t recommended for everyone, when used sparingly and with some discernment, AI generated images make it possible to bypass many of the time consuming and expensive processes involved in promoting a sale, releasing a new product, and generally supporting all of your marketing efforts from your webstore to social media and email campaigns.
- Promotional videos – this can be especially useful in a B2B context, when your value proposition requires more in-depth explanation to an educated, niche audience. Explainer videos and product releases come to life using stock video libraries and AI voice narration with a quick script.
- Identifying Trends in Complex Data – Feed Chat GPT your depletion data or a spreadsheet and ask it identify patterns, callout highlights, and provide insights or areas for improvement. These tools are alarmingly good at extrapolating insights from massive bodies of data and summarizing those at a speed we could never hope to achieve ourselves. It’s like having an unpaid (yet somehow happy) analyst on your team! It gets better over time the more it learns what you care about and what you’re looking for.
- Ninja Meeting Prep and Communications – if you use an AI notetaker like Fathom, which not only recaps and summarizes everything that transpired, but also breaks down and organizes the content into agendas, follow up and frameworks like BANT —consider feeding these meeting summaries into Chat GPT and asking for high level, simple/digestible/concise communications for your next QBR or presentation.
Most people are aware of these universal AI applications; it’s the niche, industry-specific solutions that aren’t yet on everyone’s radar that we’re here to highlight today.
Automated Distributor Billback/Invoice Management
Few in our industry know it, but the days of manual invoice entry and billback management are over. Using tools like Tradeparency’s AI Invoice Manager, wine & spirits suppliers are able to automatically match any incoming invoices to the deals in their system and catch any discrepancies to save money over time on billback errors.
This frees your team members’ time to use their talents elsewhere, where you really need humans; they’ll be happier, freed from hours of drudgery, and your bottom line will benefit from their highly motivated, inspired new life actually using their rare and valuable skills.
Maps & Route Planning
Beverage alcohol sales teams going door to door can also use AI-driven maps and route planning tools like Salesforce Maps or Lilypad to determine the most efficient way to use their time over the course of a week, given their goals.
Using logic like “show me all the accounts where I have an open objective and haven’t opened a new point of distribution in the last 12 months,” these tools can automatically plan out the most efficient route covering the highest priority accounts generated by users or dictated from the top-down.
Image Recognition
When a sales rep does make an account visit, simply snapping a photo of the backbar or shelf space at a package store location can help piece together what’s actually happening with your product(s) at the account level.
Rather than stand around asking “what part of the shelf am I on?”, AI-driven image recognition solutions enable reps to move on with their day. By analyzing all the images your reps collect in the field, image recognition does the heavy lifting with identifying your SKUs and drawing out actionable insights and suggested follow up in the accounts where you’re not on the shelf or accounts are not compliant with your trade promotions.
Automated Planograms
AI planogram builders are making it easier than ever to save tremendous time and bandwidth optimizing shelf space using historical data. These tools ensure that you are fundamentally positioned to sell more – that your product is at the right place at the right time, at the right price.
From a sales perspective, if you see that you have 2/10 facings on the shelf (20%), but your products represent 60% of the total dollars sold, that gives your team the leverage to approach the retailer for more shelf space. Using AI to draw insights from the shelf (and inform future relays) allows your brand to be as strategic, efficient, and profitable as possible off premise.
by Sarah Nagle
It’s hard, in any business, to choose strategies that promote long term growth and longevity while struggling to keep the lights on and make payroll every month. Under thinly veiled panic, we have a tendency to push our sales teams to treat our buyers as means to an end when cash is tight. Overvaluing vanity metrics like off-premise accounts sold, we scrounge for quick, small wins and placements that result in high churn and ultimately lead us right back to square one.
While we may accept – somewhere in the distant, tightly compartmentalized, “rational part” of our brain – that not all accounts are equal and that the vast majority of volume is driven by the top ten or twenty percent of our customers, we go on behaving this way nonetheless, because action feels better than a sales cycle rivaling the Great Wall of China lengthwise.
The good news for wineries & distilleries willing to be more strategic with their sales resources is that it’s not only possible, but well within one’s power to sell all of the wine & spirits one makes by winning placements with just a handful – in some cases, one or two – of the right retailers.
With so much positive feedback to part one in this series, 3 Indicators of High Volume in On-Premise Accounts, we’ve returned to deliver the criteria and common characteristics that define the off-premise accounts driving the most volume today, and how to find them.
Two Methods for Building Key Account Target Lists
What tools does a sales leader have at their disposal for building a well-researched key account target list in 2025?
Many are not yet aware that this first option exists. It’s now possible for any brand to connect directly with their distributor’s database for near real-time access to their brand-specific sold and unsold account universe. With direct visibility into specific account rankings and attributes like whether or not unsold account x has a cold box or counter positioning available at checkout for shooters/small format displays, beverage brands are already wielding this information to determine which accounts are (not) worth calling on in the first place.
The second method, manual research (usually online), is significantly more time consuming but no less critical for success in the market. Search engines and review sites like Yelp really brought this onto the scene, and it has since gotten easier without ever straying far from Google reviews. This method is so effective, in fact, that it’s possible to make a living full-time putting together and selling custom key account lists to large sales teams in the wine & spirits industry.
Do your customers shop there? Will your placement stick?
What really differentiates one package store from another? What are we really asking when we decide whether or not to include a retailer on our brand’s key account list?
The main determinant of success for your brand in any retailer is whether or not your customers shop there. It feels silly to “say out loud,” but it’s comically easy to lose sight of this. We see other brands having success at, say, Costco, and think “if I could only get a meeting with their buyer, we’d be set for life!” That may be true, but only if your customers routinely shop at Costco.
The same type of person looking for a great deal on some “pretty dang good wine” for a white elephant party might not necessarily appreciate the premium price commanded by the number of hands that touched your limited-production, esoteric varietal from harvest to bottle.
Understanding your brand and customers helps you determine which type of off-premise account best suits their needs.
Asking your team to spend all their time calling on boutique bottle shops sounds like a great way to get fired from your new gig as National Sales Manager at Four Loco.
The winning strategy for your brand might look completely different from market to market as state law allows, of course. Most people instinctively understand all of the above, but it’s worth formalizing here as a cautionary preface; pressure from the top-down to hit sales activity goals can quickly dilute even the most highly targeted sales team’s efforts.
It won’t do to simply search the “ten best liquor stores in Denver” and call it a day, but it can be a good starting point. Just use 1) fit for your brand and ideal customer persona and 2) the remaining criteria in this article to narrow your selections down.
1. A Strong Online Presence
If a package store is making an effort to generate demand online for the products they carry, you can bet that this attention to detail carries over into every area of their business:
- Has a bunch of followers and/or positive reviews on social media
- Regularly updates their instagram (or whatever channel their followers prefer) with the latest products they carry, exciting new releases, events, tastings
- A website that doesn’t look downright geriatric, lists their hours, location(s)
- Ecommerce – delivery and/or store pickup (or the ability to at least view the products the store carries)
The quickest way to tell what kind of customer experience an off-premise account offers is to search for them online – to feel out their virtual storefront. It’s a miracle, really – having even a basic, positive presence online automatically puts any package store leagues ahead of their competitors. Up-to-date websites are a staggering rarity, even in 2025.
The same way many successful wine & spirits brands link to a store locator on their website, a package store that reciprocates with visibility to your products on their website has the highest chance of catching your customers’ attention. It’s incredibly easy to drive traffic to your retail partner’s physical locations when all you need is your product’s landing page url from their site and a geotargeted, one-off email campaign to your loyal subscribers.
2. A Loyalty Program
Another way package stores – chains & independents alike – generate repeat business is to offer a convenient and rewarding loyalty program for their customers.
Stores that invite their customers to become subscribers and market to them with special offers and a competitive rewards system know that the biggest driver of revenue for any business is customer retention. If your customers love the experience your retail partner provides. Chances are far higher that when the time comes to shop your category, your inventory is less likely to gather dust awaiting random, one-off foot traffic.
3. They Offer Wine & Spirits Direct Deals
Wine & Spirits brands who are privy to this seldom acknowledged corner of our industry have the potential to trade their struggling startup woes for fast-scaling production headaches trying to keep up with demand overnight.
The regional and national chains driving wine & spirits direct deals drive so much volume on their wine & spirits direct brands in particular because they can enjoy such high margins on the products they sell this way.
This means that if Bentley’s Bourbon Cream agrees to sell exclusively through (in this case, fictional) spirits direct retailer, The Chapped Flask, in the state of Texas, The Chapped Flask’s store associates are going to hound their customers with recommendations for Bently’s and light up those shelf-placements like Christmas trees with shelf talkers, stacks, and everything short of illegal fireworks.
The tradeoff is that some of these placements can be relatively difficult to land. Which requires tenacity over a longer sales cycle akin to most national accounts.
Follow Up is Key
What indicators of high volume did we leave out? Let us know in the comments. If a retailer is a good fit for you customers and has their ducks in a row online and in store, maybe even multiple locations – your efforts are far better directed in large part to that account (and accounts like it).
Simply landing a placement is not enough, though – you’ll need to service that account to build a relationship with your buyer upon dependability and trust, preventing out of stocks and doing your part to generate your own demand to pull your product through and off their shelves.
by Sarah Nagle
With no and low-alcohol categories on the rise and the sober-curious boogeyman around every corner, we needn’t wait for rock bottom to take a hard look at our sales strategy and make a change today.
While much of the wine & spirits industry points the finger at Gen Z & Millennials, the World Health Organization or the Surgeon General, the truth is there’s only one entity responsible for the trajectory of our revenue.
According to Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin in Extreme Ownership, when “problems feel overwhelming and insurmountable . . . it’s our human nature to shift blame, find excuses, and avoid consequences. But taking ownership over what went wrong and accepting the reality of the situation gives you complete control over how you can solve these challenges.”
Trying to sell alcohol in 2025 is tough. Plain and simple, no way around it. With that acknowledged, let’s explore what we can do about it.
A Sign of the Times
If there was one take-away from the recent WSWA Access Live convention, it was that traditional wine & spirits sales are down, and non-traditional and non-alcoholic beverages are here to stay. The convention’s “Opening General Session: A State of the Alcohol Industry” featured Winemaker and Doctor Laura Catena who spoke on the recent U.S. dietary guidelines on alcohol consumption, concluding that we should drink higher quality beverages, and less often. She was followed by Danny Brager and Dale Stratton of SipSource who pointed to plummeting sales, and a failure of on-premise sales to bounce back to post pandemic levels, concluding that we as an industry need to shift with changing demands.
The buzz around non-alc and non-traditional beverages was on display at sessions like “More than a Trend: How Non-Alcoholic Wine & Spirits are Reshaping the Market” with speaker Stephanie Honig, and the “No & Low Mixology Workshop”. Those events drew crowds, but they paled in comparison to the boisterous gathering of the “Hemp Beverage Meet & Greet” presented by the Hemp Beverage Alliance. Granted, the location of the event being Denver, Colorado might have contributed to the popularity of the hemp beverage presence at the show.
In her session, Stephanie Honig, a member of the Honig winemaking family and founder of no-alcoholic wine brand Missing Thorn, said that her target audience is not solely sober or pregnant people, but that it is primarily made up of alcohol consumers who are looking to cut back for a multitude of reasons. She cited the aging “boomer” population that might be cutting back for health reasons, while the younger “Gen Z” generation are choosing to drink less alcohol in general.
A Fruitless Battlefield
Skimming wine & spirits headlines, one gets the impression that the widely-regarded antidote to an increasingly sober society rests on our ability to change consumer perception: to prove “alcohol’s not so bad for you after all; it might even help you live longer!” so that young people change their minds and imbibe more frequently.
If we could just get a modern Edward Bernays to make drinking cool again, these writers seem to think, then every tech bro and YouTuber would be out to liquid lunch again like some ramen-haired Don Draper. At last, we could get back to arguing about our favorite topics instead, like whether gruyère or butterkäse pairs better with a nice grüner veltliner.
In the opening paragraphs of Breakthrough Advertising, copywriting giant Eugene M. Schwartz offers a different take on the matter:
“Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears, and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already-existing desires onto a particular product. This is the copy writer’s task: not to create this mass desire—but to channel and direct it.
Actually, it would be impossible for any one advertiser to spend enough money to actually create this mass desire. He can only exploit it. And he dies when he tries to run against it.”
It’s up to every beverage brand to figure out why people who do drink should drink their product in particular, rather than attempting to change their lapsed customers’ beliefs and behaviors with an already strained marketing budget.
Selling is Listening.
The nice thing about the fundamentals, or basic principles of sales & marketing is that they never change. Wildfires? Tariffs? War? Global Pandemic? To an accomplished brand strategist and copywriter, these are just another lens offering audience insights.
What mass desire or need does your product satisfy? Why is your brand the best at helping your ideal customer get what they want and become their actualized, ideal self? For a clear and simple explanation of how to script out your brand message, see Donald Miller’s Building A StoryBrand.
To sell more alcohol in the age of neo-prohibitionism’s growing influence and the rise of no and low-alcohol enjoyment, we need to understand our existing customers better.
Start with repeat customers, your evangelists – the people who have given you money for your product(s) more than once.
- Why did they choose you?
- What are they getting out of your product?
- When they consume your product, what else are they doing, with whom, and when? Do they order it out, or drink it at home?
- Do they prefer it in bundles, or individual bottles? Cases, half cases? Single-servings like cans, 750ml, or large format?
- Is it a special occasion purchase, or their daily drinker? How much do they usually spend on a bottle of wine or whiskey?
- How much do they consume, and in what configuration – neat? In cocktails? Cold? Room temp? Over ice, up, on the rocks?
- With a meal? Without a meal? Hosting tastings? Do they enjoy pairings, or couldn’t care less?
- What time of day?
- In what type of glass? Stemless or stemmed? In a lowball or a Glencairn?
- In more than one sitting, the whole bottle, or split with friends?
- What else do they drink? How often do they drink alcohol? What do they drink when they’re not drinking alcohol?
- How do they spend their free time? What circles or communities do they run in? What kind of person are they? What are their beliefs? What do they stand for?
Craft your brand messaging for this person, with their habits in mind. Go and find more of that person. Fish where the fish are, with bait that matches their prey of choice for that time and place.
One can go overboard with questions, sure – you needn’t request a blood panel (unless you’re selling wearable glucose monitors). The questions that are most relevant and strategic will depend on your go to market strategy, products, and brand. Mine these data with discretion, seeking insights that will inform your future outreach and define your ideal customer persona.
Fortunately, eCommerce and DTC sales have made historical customer data collection easier than ever. For just one example of this critical listening exercise, check out this recent Linkedin article from Go Brewing’s founder, Joe Chura, who generously shared some of their recent insights.
Some eCommerce providers offer decent enough reporting to glean a lot of this information already, but there’s nothing wrong with outright asking customers in a survey. Producers who are dissatisfied with the native reporting capabilities of their eCommerce provider can always enlist custom third-party analytics and data warehousing for total command of this listening practice, with the added benefit of pulling from multiple data sources like 3 tier depletions, wine club/subscriptions, and tasting room sales.
Adopt, Adapt, or Accommodate?
In a market pressurized like an overcarbonated homebrew, the stakes feel higher. How do alcohol brands react to changing consumer habits and behaviors?
One detrimental consequence of obsessing over no and low-alcohol’s impact is that we tend to corral ourselves into thinking about alcohol by volume as a zero sum game. “If my customers are drinking more low alcohol options, that means they’re spending less on me!” That’s not necessarily the case, when you seriously consider how your product fits into the broader narrative of their lifestyle, and assimilate your message accordingly.
Customer alignment has always been the path to longevity in business. It’s up to each producer to decide if adopting or adding an NA option to their lineup is worth the investment.
Many wineries, distilleries, and breweries have already added NA offerings to their portfolio and are merrily selling both. Heineken hardly broke a sweat rolling out the world’s best-selling 0.0 ABV beer alongside their flagship offering. Even smaller craft distilleries are releasing creative additions to their regular lineup with botanical NA pours like Burnt Church Distillery’s Amethyst. Bev-alc brands looking to join the fray needn’t restrict themselves to simply alcohol-free expressions of their existing products; this decision, too, warrants a case-by-case (no pun intended) basis.
It’s not just producers cashing in on NA; unsurprisingly, early-adopter wholesalers with robust NA portfolios are seeing their revenue doubled in key markets like Utah — traditionally a relative blind spot in that dry desert.
Sporting a no or low-alcohol option doesn’t make any sense at all for many drinks brands. To “know thyself” is a gift; leaning into your authentic identity has the potential to further endear you to your audience and attune your brand to its proper niche. If your customer base never turns down or dries out, lowering your (alcohol by) volume could estrange your brand from their way of life. One misstep, unfortunately, is sometimes all it takes to fall out of alignment with our loyal customers – to catastrophic effect.
Unless you’re dead-set on all out war with non-alcoholic beverages, an alternative to selling your own NA offerings is to accommodate your existing customer’s preferences wherever applicable. If you find your loyal customers bringing their sober friends and family along for a visit to your tasting room, you likely only stand to gain guest satisfaction and repeat business by accommodating those needs with NA guest taps and a friendly, easy-to-find NA category on your menu.
When your existing website customers experience life change and can’t (or decide not to) drink for whatever reason. Do they still have a way to signify membership in the brand identity you’ve cultivated together? Invite them to customize future shipments, ask for their opinion on future product development, or simply offer branded merchandise like top-notch glassware to enjoy their NA beverages in. Again, look for ways to participate in their lifestyle – barrel-age coffee beans from their favorite roaster in a cool collaboration, or arrange gift sets that make their lives easier around holidays.
Actualize Your Sales Goals
Finally, once it’s clear where your beverage business fits into the big picture, the way to win in a competitive beverage landscape full of seemingly endless choices is to be extremely targeted and strategic with your limited resources in the market.
Tracking sales execution against goals and measuring the results is easier than ever before with specialized CRM tools geared towards beverage alcohol. Beverage brands are already leveraging leading indicators of success like survey questions at the account level to anticipate challenges and outmaneuver their competitors.
There’s never been a more exciting time for consumers. Brands come and go, but our first love – enjoying the little things – isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
by Sarah Nagle