Change your focus, change your fortunes: How to sell more wine and spirits
TLDR: The key to selling more wine and spirits is to stop focusing on the features and benefits of your product(s) and start focusing on what your customers want.?
Breathing your own exhaust
The ability to “sell ice to Inuits” has always been a badge of honor among salespeople.
The wine and spirits industry is chock full of salespeople who:
However, this way of selling has no place in the modern environment, where, as Daniel Pink puts it in his book To Sell is Human, “Salespeople are superfluous in a world where people can find anything with a few keystrokes.”
Most salespeople genuinely believe that if they can get in front of the buyer and be given a chance to talk about their products, they can make more sales.
The problem with this product-centric approach is it assumes that they can “differentiate” their products enough to stand out from the crowd.
But if you truly want to stand out from the crowd, you must always put the buyer first. Thank goodness Carole Mahoney wrote a book about this, appropriately titled “Buyer First.”
The more you act like a salesperson, the LESS you will sell
Modern selling prioritizes the customer’s needs and preferences over the product being sold.
In Mastering Complex Sales, Jeff Thull says, “The sale should be merely a byproduct of a much larger relationship.”
Selling is less about persuasion and more about adding real value to the business relationship.?
But wine and spirits salespeople miss these opportunities every day of the week, in every corner of the world, because they cannot let go of the “old school” ways of selling.
News flash: It’s not about the product
The world needs another Chardonnay or vodka like a hole in the head.?
Having a great product in a great package at a great price is table stakes. These things merely get you to the starting line.
The wine and spirits landscape has become extremely competitive. Too many brands are competing for shrinking shelf space and wine lists.??
The array of choices for retailers and restaurants is incredibly vast. To stand out, you’d better offer more than just a great-tasting product.
To survive and thrive in the modern selling environment, salespeople must learn NEW skills such as:
Sadly, most wine and spirits salespeople have never been trained in the modern selling method.?
Product knowledge training is NOT sales training!
This approach would make sense if selling were all about the product. Maybe that’s why so many salespeople (and sales leaders) practice it. They don’t know there is a better way to sell.
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Is product knowledge essential? Absolutely! But, unfortunately, it’s just not enough.
I do a fair amount of recruiting for my clients, and I’m always shocked to learn that very few salespeople have read any modern books about selling.
Product certification abounds. But rare indeed is a company that invests in modern sales training techniques. By this, I mean learning how to bring real value to a business relationship.
EMPATHY for a buyer’s pain points and taking the time to get inside the buyer’s world is far more important than product knowledge.?
Here is an important truth that most sellers miss: The sale happens in the buyer’s world, not yours.
Success in selling is really only about two things
The first is who to sell to. The second is how to sell to them.
Who to sell to is about taking the time to create a key account target list. Not all accounts are equal; it’s not even close.?
How to sell is about the approach.
Most salespeople in our industry ignore both and wonder why they fail to achieve their sales goals.
Zig Ziglar said it best: “You can get everything in life you want if you help enough other people get what they want.”
When you shift your focus from what you need/want to sell to what the buyer needs and wants, powerful things happen. Doing this well requires training and practice.?
If your sales aren’t where you want them to be, I invite you to examine closely how your salespeople are (or are not) embracing these two things.
If you can’t change your people, change your people
I want to invite you to watch this video, “5 Sales Team Mistakes Winery and Distillery Owners Make,” and see how you compare.
You may also benefit significantly from this video: “How to Hire a KILLER Salesperson.”
If you are confident in the people you have on your sales team, that is excellent news. I would then ask you to take a hard look at how you’re investing in their sales effectiveness by providing them with training beyond product knowledge.
Live, in-person training is expensive and time-consuming. Online training is the best way to go. Especially if the training platform is delivered on a platform that records each student’s progress.
We live in a marvelous time. Sales training can be conducted without plane tickets, hotel rooms, meeting spaces, or meals, and it can be done from anywhere at any time.
You can’t eat like a bird and poop like an elephant. If you want higher levels of sales performance, you will need to allocate the funds for it.
Do you have questions or comments? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below!
Founder at Intercept & Influence | Marketing framework utilized by global brands | Franchisee/Small Business Marketing Toolkits | Email | Go-To-Market Strategies | Goal: Eat at all restaurants on the LA Times List ???
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