What we can all learn about sales from Wine

Since moving to Australia, like many Europeans, I've had to reevaluate what I'm willing to spend on a good bottle wine.

How this led me into analyzing sales may be tenuous, but there's a good point to be made somewhere I promise. Plus, if you're anything like me then since lock down and Covid impacted all of our lives, your appreciation for, and consumption of wine, may have seen somewhat of a slight incline....

Not only that, but aren't you bored of reading LinkedIn articles with no plot?

The beginning bit

So, living in England, with France just a hop, skip and jump away, wine is cheap. Not as cheap as it in France, but it's cheap. In the UK you can buy an exceptional bottle of wine for about $30. You can get one even better in France itself for about $15. Even seeing a $100 bottle of wine in a shop in the UK would be rare.

The middle bit

Fast forward a few years or decades and I move to Australia. Dan Murphy's I was told. Dan's is where you need to go to get cheap booze! So off to Dan's i went. Then I walked straight out again, looked up at the sign to check I was in the right place, then went back inside to find the "cheap" bit. I've not got the stats, but my guess would be the average price of a bottle of wine in Dan's is around $30. Ish? My little European head could not wrap around this new reality. Had I emmigrated to the wrong place? Should I have gone to New Zealand after all? So I did what all (or most) Brits do when they move to Aus and I bought a 'cheap' bottle of wine for about $10. And it was filthy.

The after the middle but not quite the end bit

After several years of readjustment and counselling, I had come to terms with the fact that decent wine in Australia is every bit as good as Europe providing you're happy to pay for it, and pay for it I did. Then comes onto the scene the femme-fetal of the story, my now wife. The first trip we ever took was to the Hunter Valley Wine Region. Our second was to the Margaret River Wine Region. We got married in Orange. A wine region. Now I'm not saying there's a theme here, but for someone who'd never been to a cellar door, I was experiencing a lot of them very quickly.

OMG. Never in my life has the text-speak acronym taught to me by my teenage daughter been quite so relevant. The wine was exceptional, and my budget didn't just go out the window, I stopped even thinking about wine in terms of price. Which leads me onto the point of this entire article.

The pointy bit

The reason I pay more for wine at a cellar door is because I appreciate it more. The reason I appreciate it more is because of the experience I'm given when I go and the time and effort the sales people spend to educate me about their product. Some of the wine I buy at cellar doors you can get in bottle shops. Would I have ever bought the same wine from a bottle shop - no. Because there's no love, no finesse, no lasting experience. Same product though.

Sales has never been about the product, not really. Very few products don't have competition, and the cheapest isn't always the most successful, so it's also not about price. For the most part, sales is about the experience you provide to the customer, plain and simple. Customer centricity doesn't just mean putting your customer first, it means building your entire sales strategy around that customer so that the experience you deliver to them is infallible.

The nearly the end bit

Whatever your company, whatever your product, I think everyone can learn from wine.

I should probably also make a statement about the responsible consumption of alcohol, but as this tale was around appreciation more than consumption, hopefully I'm not sending out too many wrong signals.

The end