We have learned from our seven years of teaching WISE Academy courses that training tasting room staff members pays off in big ways. It changes their behavior and moves the needle on our key metrics in the Tasting Room to increase sales, customer loyalty and profit. In our Tasting Room…
Ready or not, here comes a new year! With a brand-spanking-new year ahead of us, let’s see how we can raise the bar on our own performance, and execute on some new, actionable initiatives we didn’t get around to this year. If we have been paying attention to the data…
We can’t help but be constantly reminded that we aren’t the only winery in our region. We simply cannot get away from each other, but that’s actually a good thing. We don’t go to a mall because they have one good store, we go for the selection of many good…
Often we are asked about tasting room staff incentives for wineries and best practices for a program. An Incentive Compensation Program (ICP) is a tool used to motivate and compensate a sales professional to meet goals or metrics – over a specific period of time – to help achieve business goals. When…
As the year comes to a close, if your fiscal year also is the calendar year, you are probably knee-deep in planning for next year. Regardless, we’re about to begin a new quarter and a new year, so let’s plan for success! Remember, when you fail to plan, you plan…
After meeting someone for the first time and enjoying the experience, it’s natural to ask for contact information so that we can keep in touch and hopefully see them again. This is true in our personal lives, so why not in the tasting room? When guests come to our winery,…
How many times does a wine country visitor hear: “Where are you from?” And how often does our tasting room staff ask it in a day, a weekend, a week…? It’s not that finding out where a person is from is not important; it’s all in the how we find out. Eventually…
How do you know if your tasting room team is winning or losing? Are you even keeping score? How do you know whether you’re “meeting your numbers” if you don’t really understand what those numbers mean? Most winery executives know their direct-to-consumer (DtC) sales numbers and probably their tasting room…
With the New Year fast approaching, we have a fresh slate and a chance to start the year off right. As the saying goes “If you don’t know where you’re going, any bus will take you there.” Even if our organization is clear on where we are going, we will…
More quality, not quantity please. It’s November. Harvest is wrapping up. Visitor traffic is slowing way down. Now what? How are we going to drive winter tasting room sales with so little traffic? Remember the number of visitors doesn’t matter nearly as much as the quality of the traffic. Qualified…