Customer Trends and Triggers
Posted by admin on July 2nd, 2007Selling any product requires understanding the needs and sales triggers of your customers. Knowing what they want and how they are served by your products is key to having a successful sales program. Many businesses think they have too tight a budget to do market research or simply feel they don’t have the time to investigate what their customer trends are. Access to your sales data and filtering through it are not always easy tasks. Below are three tips for making your investigation more efficient and productive so that you may better understand your customer base and their purchase patterns and triggers.
1. Maintain your sales data in one database.
Whenever possible, process your sales through one system, including: online orders, wine club shipments, tasting room purchases, phone orders, special event ticket sales, etc.. This will help you identify a customer’s true preference and history. For example: A customer could be a member of a Reds Only wine club, but has an online purchase history which shows they purchase 3x more white wine than red. If this was a consistent trend with your “Reds Only” club members you could improve your club member communications to include more info on your white varietals. This is low hanging fruit (unspoken demand for your product) which may be answered by an appropriate offering.
2. Identify your top 50 customers and where they make their purchases.
A customer’s sales pattern and history in the tasting room can be very different from their online and wine club purchase patterns. Defining where they make their purchases will help you develop offerings which are most attractive as well as help you determine where your resources should be allocated. Maximizing the online sales potential of your tasting room customers will help you reduce your overhead, while maintaining a direct relationship with those customers. (If you are having problems maintaining a direct relationship with your customers virtually I can put you in touch with our Client Development dept for advice.)
3. Maintain a calendar of all direct mass communication with your customer base, news/ratings on your products and events at which your wines are present.
This is one of the simplest and most overlooked tactics in defining customer purchase triggers and purchase patterns. We all know that people respond to favorable published ratings in local/regional/national wine rags, but which customers are these? Which of your customers did you convert from a basic newsletter recipient to a customer through an email blast? Which customers did you acquire through the direct result of an event? There are simple tactics to identify and track these sales triggers on a customer-by-customer basis, if you have the right tools and process in place, and to use this information in developing your e-marketing campaigns. Haven’t you always wanted to know how many sales you made due to participation in that big event you invested big $$$ to attend?
My favorite conversation to have any business is one where I show them they are already empowered to accomplish a goal they thought was out of their reach. Every business should have ownership of their customer history and data, although many don’t. Not because they don’t have access to their customer data, but because they don’t have the tools they need or a partner to help them utilize the tools to their full potential. This is what singles Inertia out from every other company in the wine industry. Inertia ensures your ownership of your customers as well as provides you with tools AND the know-how on how to use them so that you may best serve your customer base.
If you can use help with the know-how, tools or strategies for maximizing your direct sales, just drop me a line. There’s help just around the corner.
Onward and upward,
Alex Kajani
