REthink Wine Blog

According to the Tennessee legislative webpage, Governor Phil Bredesen signed SB0166/HB 1155 into law on June 4^th, legalizing direct shipments by wineries to Tennessee consumers.  This is a pretty reasonable direct shipping bill, requiring a $300 fee and $150 annual renewal, payment of excise and sales taxes and the usual adult signature requirements.  The consumer volume limitation is no more than 9-liters per consumer in a month and 27 liters (3 standard cases) per year.  This is a big step forward for consumer direct shipping as it is another state adapting reasonable rules in conformance with successful direct to consumer shipping programs in other states, a trend seen recently in Kansas and hopefully soon, Maine.  I haven’t seen an effective date but will get out the details once I have them.  Still waiting to find out on the status of Maine, which is pending before their governor.

Recently the Inertia Direct-to-Trade team hosted two events in Lake Tahoe and Sacramento to showcase just a handful of our clients who are selling direct. Wineries attended the events to pour select wines for restaurant and wine shop owners. The wineries were encouraged to promote their own brand in these select markets while also gaining a list of trade contacts to encourage future sales.

The Tahoe portion of the event was hosted at  Sunnyside Steakhouse, a popular destination for both locals and tourists to the area. On this gorgeous Tahoe spring day, the venue provided tasters not only some fabulous wines but also a spectacular view of the lake. The second half of the trip was spent in Sacramento where Inertia hosted another wine tasting at the Citizen Hotel, a newly renovated building located downtown.

Our featured portfolio varied, providing a range of selection for potential buyers who came from all around the Tahoe and the greater Sacramento area to taste the wines. Wineries that were featured came from Napa, Sonoma, the Central Coast, Willamette… all the way to Walla Walla. All of these wines have not readily available in these markets in the past, and these two events provided an entry to the market for some great boutique brands who are selling through our Direct-to-Trade program.

Inertia hopes to host more events that enable wineries to directly connect with trade accounts to our Direct to Trade wineries. We expect to see many of the wines featured at the tastings throughout establishments in the Tahoe and Sacramento area this upcoming summer.

For more on this, please check out a great review and synopsis of some of the featured wines by journalist Barbara Keck. Featured in the Tahoe Weekly, you can also read her blog post entitled “Where to Wine in Lake Tahoe” here.

No one is fooling anyone. The discounts that are flowing to wine consumers these days are many and frequent. However, if you choose to offer your mailing list members a discount, think about linking that discount to something that brings you long term benefits rather than just a quick hit: Consider offering a significant one-time discount to anyone who joins your wine club.

Consider the Wine Club, for instance, that delivers four shipments annually to members and costs $200 per shipment. That price probably includes a 20% discount on the price of the wine included in the shipments. Now consider that the average wine club member will stay in your club for at least 3-4 shipments. Even if you offer mailing list members a 50% discount on a package of 4 wines if they join the wine club, you come out ahead in the long run financially, plus you are likely to create a real evangelist for your wines—assuming you do what should do with wine club members—treat them like kings.

The benefits of accumulating new wine club members far outweighs nearly any pain that comes with momentarily or conditionally discounting your wine.

As a manager (and parent), I am a believer that the key to learning is making mistakes. That is, if you make the effort to evaluate your mistakes and then do things differently next time.

Technology companies use post-project reviews, or “post mortems” as a method to conduct this type of analysis. However, any business can benefit – if you set out to accomplish an objective within a specific period of time, you’ve got a project ripe for review. Think about barrel tasting events, winemaker dinners, in-market visits, auctions, wine club runs, etc. An effective post-mortem will help you identify:

• what went well
• what didn’t go so well
• areas where you can improve
• how to achieve that improvement

There are three primary stages to an effective post mortem:

1. Preparation
2. The Meeting
3. Follow-Up

Preparation

First, determine who will participate. At a minimum, require attendance of all the people who  performed the day-to-day activities. It can also be informative to invite everyone who was at all a part of the project, from budget planners to the executives who set company direction. Once you’ve decided on your list of participants, choose a meeting facilitator. If you have the luxury of assigning someone who was not directly involved in the project, that can help in that they are more likely to be impartial. Otherwise, just make sure to put on your impartial observer hat. You will also need a designated note-taker.

Perhaps most importantly, set your intentions, goals, and agenda for the meeting in advance and distribute them to the team. This allows the participants to prepare on their own which makes the meeting go more efficiently and helps everyone stay on track. Consider also posing questions ahead of time to spark ideas and reflection. Read the rest of this entry »

I just finished reading an entertaining book, Breaking the Slump by Jimmy Roberts.  Roberts is a sports reporter for ESPN, ABC, and NBC.  The book is specifically about golf, but the lessons learned from the dozen or so golfers he interviewed can easily, and I believe successfully, be applied to life in general.

The overriding theme of the different stories profiled is that; one, everyone will hit a slump, and two, you’re in a slump because something changed.  It’s amazing to me that these highly skilled professional athletes, who spend thousands of hours practicing, would have something as fundamental as the way the hold the club, change over time. For most of them, the way they broke out of their slump was to get back to basics.  Some returned to their first coach, others went back to old equipment they use to use, others simply started enjoying the game again.

So how does this apply to business, and specifically the wine business.  My principal skill set is sales.  I’m pretty good at it, and have had a fair amount of success.  I’ve also had slumps.  Weeks, even months, when I couldn’t close a deal.  Most often it was due to one of two things.  I had either lost my enthusiasm for what I was selling, or I had stopped doing the basics and just jumped to the end game.  If I’m honest with myself, I’ll admit I had stopped working as hard as I had to, and tried to coast on my past successes.

How many wineries are in a slump today?  Easy to blame it on the economy, and maybe that is the total reason.  However, I suspect that some of us have strayed from the basics that built our business in the first place.  Do we spend time in the tasting room connecting with our customers, or do we leave that to the staff?  Have we picked up the phone and placed a call to some club members, or have we just been too busy for that?  How about market visits? Have we spent time in the trenches with our distributors? Have we looked at our pricing in relation to our competition? Most importantly, are we, and our staff, still enjoying what we are doing?  Are we letting the pressure of todays market dampen our enthusiasm, and reflect in our dealings with our customers?

Is there a magic pill for breaking out of a slump? Unfortunately,no there is not.  Most often it is as elemental as remembering how you became successful in the first place, and returning to those actions.

Good luck, and good selling,

Mitch

Periodically, take a moment to step back and look at your store. Are you maintaining it regularly? Does it have a clean, tight presentation? Here are a few high level tips and suggestions to help you wipe the dust off your store.

Storefront

Your store landing page is one of the most important pages within your site. Make sure that it’s intuitive and easy to use through strong hierarchy and logical organization.

Hierarchy
If you want to grab your customer’s attention with certain products and promotions, don’t bury them deep within your store pages. Treat your store landing page like a window display, and place your most important features front and center. The CMS area at the top of your store page is precious real estate that can be strategically used.

Cellar 360 includes a kicker for Father’s Day.

Organization
Organization goes hand-in-hand with the hierarchy of your store set-up. Who has time (or patience) to sort through a mish-mash of this, that, and the other? Make the shopping experience as easy and painless as possible. Guide your customer’s eye through the store by hierarchy, and make it easy for them to sort through your products by organization. Create logical categories within your store. For example:

• By Product Type (Wines, Gifts, Accessories)
• By Varietal (Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chardonnay)
• By Wine Type (Red, White, Dessert)
• By Usage (Wines to Pair with Food, Wines to Cellar)

Within the CMS area at the top of the page, you can create image buttons which link to your different categories. While the automated category crumbs are convenient and easy-to-use, images are attention grabbing and can instantaneously tell a customer what they can expect. (This is one of the reasons that iconography is so widely used.)

Terra Valentine uses bottle shots to give a preview of each store category.

Israeli Wine Direct sells several different brands of wine and uses labels to show each store category.

Products

Take time to focus on each product’s imagery and content.

Images
Don’t underestimate the importance of your product images. The quality of your images communicate the quality of the product and brand.

Are you debating between using bottle shots or labels? If you have substantial inventory, you may find yourself fighting for space. Try using a 3-column store setup with labels as thumbnail images. Labels require less vertical height, so even when displayed at a smaller scale the branding of the label will remain prominent. (As a compromise, you can always use a bottle shot on the product detail page.)

Now if your situation allows you flexibility between use of bottle shots or labels, my personal preference is to use a bottle shot. This is reflective of what your customers are accustomed to seeing on the store shelves and their dining room tables. Besides, what could be more enticing than a glossy bottle shot with deep shading, striking highlights and a crisp, clean label? If all you have are grainy snapshots taken from your old Olympus camera, with your reflection clearly visible in the bottle, than I highly recommend investing in professional photography. (Artisan Media knows what they’re doing.)

Tamber Bey uses beautiful bottle photography throughout their site.

Teaser Description
Tantilize your customers’ taste buds with a short description (1-2 sentences) about your product. If available, also include a noteworthy review or award. Your teaser could be the deal breaker between click or no click, so give extra thought to what is written.

Venge Vineyards includes a short description and awards in their teasers.

Detail Description
Use your product detail page to elaborate on the description of your product. Keep in mind that while you are providing more information, there is a such thing as “too” long, so be concise and clear. (And if you can’t say it like Steinbeck, it may be better to take a simpler approach – make it short and sweet!) Include any other relevant information a customer might want to know such as pairings, tasting notes and reviews/awards. If you have have PDFs, you can include them as downloads. Or if you have pairings in another section of your site, link back and forth.

B Cellars includes ratings and suggested pairings on their detail pages. Winemaker notes can also be downloaded.

Rodney Strong includes a vineyard map and product sheet which can be downloaded. Notice how they use icons for these downloads.

Dear Valued Client,

Client support and education has always been at the heart of our mission here at Inertia. We recognize that selling direct can be complicated, and are always seeking ways to support your requests for more information, more opportunities to enhance your businesses, and more tools to help you succeed.

With that in mind, we’re very happy to introduce Inertia INSITE, your new web-based direct sales community.

INSITE is built around a social networking frame. This means that in addition to finding a remarkable amount of REthink Engine and Direct Sales support materials on INSITE, you can also interact with Inertia client support, Account Managers, Sales and Marketing folks, as well as with your peers in the Wine Industry who use the REthink Engine.

Think of it as Facebook meets Inertia Client Service.

The INSITE community is being launched exclusively on behalf of Inertia clients. Every month, we will explore the business issues you’ve asked about most. We’ll pose and moderate forums on at least one major business issue per month, providing strategic insight and guidance, best practices and quick tips to get your program moving on all fronts.

On INSITE, you will be able to:

All efforts to support and enhance INSITE are designed to help Inertia clients maximize their direct sales and marketing efforts.

There is no other resource like INSITE within the wine industry. Please take a moment to join and see for yourself. You may join the INSITE community by visiting http://www.inertiainsite.com.

We are excited to launch this new community and look forward to seeing you on INSITE. We hope to see you there. Afterall…it wouldn’t be a community without you.

Cheers!

Stephen Mutch, Senior Director of Client Services
stephen.mutch@inertiabev.com

How Do You Manage Your Business Today, With Tomorrow in Mind?
A community forum

All of our valued clients are invited to join us May 19th, for a community involved discussion focused on understanding how to be successful in today’s market, while being conscious of long term brand and financial goals.

Please join us for a town hall-style meeting, with breakout sessions focused on stimulating lively discussion and collaborative dialogue. In addition, Inertia will be announcing the release of our brand new Online Community Forum, Inertia Insite.

Bring your ideas, a bottle of wine to share and be ready to meet and talk with your wine industry neighbors.

When | Tuesday, May 19th, 1:30 - 5pm

Where | Springhill Suites, 101 Gateway Rd, Napa

Forum Agenda

1:30 - 2:00 | Meet & Greet

2:00 - 2:15 | Word from our CEO, Ted Jansen

2:15 - 4:15

* Inertia Insite Online Community & Forum Introduction, Stephen Mutch, Sr. Director Client Services

* Managing Your Business Today, with Tomorrow In Mind

- Break out Sessions | All

- Group Discussion | All

4:15 - 4:45 | Wine & Cheese Reception

RSVP | Please contact your Account Manager to RSVP. Space is limited, call or email soon.

Looking forward to seeing you in May!

Kansas became the most recent state to adopt sensible, verifiable direct wine shipment when Gov. Sebelius signed a law passed by the Kansas legislature that would permit Kansas residents to purchase up to 12 cases of wine per calendar year from out-of-state wineries who obtain a Special Order shipping license for only $50.  The law takes effect on July 1st.

Of significance the law includes an age verification requirement that will assure that only adults can make a purchase and a tax bond requirement to assure the state that the licensed winery will remit the appropriate taxes.  It is a win-win across the board and is a model of the type of shipping laws states can adopt to allow wineries to sell to customers in their state without undue restraints yet still provide the level of security and accountability desirable to prevent wine from falling into the hands of minors and for the payment of excise and sales taxes.

Age verification is a relatively new wrinkle in the laws being promulgated by states entering the world of direct shipment and I think it is a good idea.  Age verification services now make it possible to efficiently verify a potential purchaser’s age online for a transaction fee of around 40 cents each.  Yes, it creates an extra burden on wineries shipping to the state.  But it also gives assurance to states considering opening themselves to direct shipment and is powerful ammunition against specious arguments that teenagers will be able to order wine online.  As more states adopt age verification requirements it is reasonable to expect these transaction fees to come down as the volume of orders using the systems increase.

It’s all about making wine available in more states and to more consumers who want that access.  Age verification is a tremendous use of technology to accomplish that goal.

I’m spending some time in Florida, introducing Direct-to-Trade and some incredible wines to select accounts in Naples, Tampa and Orlando. I feel like I’m coming to a knife fight with a Bazooka! I’m taking the state by storm, armed with some incredible juice with incredible pedigrees; Lamborn Family vineyards, Jones Family Vineyards, Three Sticks and Olson Ogden just to name a few. In this rough economic climate, the smart people are looking for ways to survive, differentiation is one way, and Direct-to-Trade is the way to accomplish it.

This evening I walked into Absinthe Restaurant, a beautiful restaurant on the north side of Naples. It has an incredibly clean look without being sterile. The colors were soft, yet contrasting, white and a green you’d find after peeling a cucumber. I sat down at the bar and introduced myself to Armand, the owner/manager/bartender/husband/father which explains why he was attempting to wipe the exhaustion out of his eyes. We chatted for a quick minute as I explained the program and he responded with “Makes sense, let’s taste some wine.”

After tasting through the line up, he was blown away by the 2006 Three Sticks Chardonnay, and the 2006 Olson Ogden Pinot (which will soon be available exclusively in Naples at Absinthe, hence the differentiation) but now to the good part, I wanted to stay for a bite to eat. I asked him to pick two dishes, which is kind of a status quo for me, as I figure who better to ask than the people that eat the food on a regular basis, right?!

The first dish he brought was a julienned salad of apples and machengo cheese with copious amounts of fresh crab and a few caramelized onions… WOW!
Round two; two lamb sliders (which were more along the lines of mini burgers than sliders) with goat cheese and thinly sliced rounds of egg plant with a bit of arugula … Speechless. I live in the Napa Valley so I’m pretty spoiled when it comes to food, and I have never had a burger, lamb or otherwise, that has come anywhere near perfection as this one did, Thomas Keller take note (and I know I’ll be hearing from Thomas as he follows my blogs religiously). BRAVO my friend. Look, if you go to Absinthe, order the Lamb Sliders and don’t like them, send me an e-mail along with an explanation and I’ll refund your money.

Moral to the story? Armand gets it. In this economic climate you have to set yourself apart from your competition; whether it be through the food you serve, the wine you have on your list, or the service you provide, you need to do it and do it right. Armand has the food, he has the service, and now, thanks to Direct-To-Trade, he has the wine, Armand GETS IT….Period.