The Dip by Seth Godin - OVERDUE
Posted by Paul Mabray on May 7th, 2007This is a long overdue post to Seth and his team. I was fortunate enough to receive a pre-copy of “The Dip” by Seth Godin. This is Seth’s new book and as usual, filled with brilliance in digestible formats. Probably one of the smallest books he’s written. Fortunately for me he distills it into three lines:
Quit the wrong stuff.
Stick with the right stuff.
Have the guts to do one of the other.
In a nutshell - Seth tells us to go 110% or go home. That extra 10% distinguishes you and makes you a powerful offering. If you are only going to go 90%, you might as well quit.
Most of you know I am a huge fan of Seth’s (although I did recently make a faux pas recently when I invited him to an SF wine event - he lives in NY and doesn’t drink wine). How does this apply to the wine industry - to me it centers around distribution and direct. In traditional distribution you can NEVER be 110% unless you are a large company.
My last post was about using ecommerce and the phone to fuel your direct sales. These are the highest potential areas for growth for a winery.  My advice (reinforced by Seth’s book) is quit fighting the area that you can not win and start focusing on giving 110% on direct. Do it superbly and you will succeed in longevity, sustainability, and profitability. Only doing it 50% or focusing only on people coming to your tasting room will limit your success and you will be stuck in “The Dip.”
