You operate in a crowded, highly-competitive market. You’re trying to grow and keep your supplier base by distinguishing yourself as a good steward of their brands. At the same time, you’re trying to grow sales in your territory, usually at a rate determined by factors beyond your control. As an owner, you’ve made it your mission to make everyone happy, while managing crushing goals. How do you cope? Let us show you how.
Consulting Services
SALES AND MANAGEMENT DIAGNOSTICS
What are you doing right, what are you doing wrong and most importantly, what are you not doing at all? These are the questions we ask when we look at your business. We analyze your culture, your processes and your strategy, identify where the pain is coming from and offer proven solutions to help you succeed.
Hiring and Retaining Top Performers
You want to retain the best people, so be sure you’ve made the right choices in the first place. If you think you’re busy now and can’t afford to take the time to properly research and interview the best possible candidate for the position you’re looking to fill, then just add up the time you’re going to waste over the next twelve to twenty-four months trying to fix the problems this bad decision may create. We show you how to recruit the people who won’t just work for a paycheck, they'll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.
Startup Advisory Services
We have experience guiding startups from concept to funding in the wine and spirits import and distribution sector. We can help you write a business plan, develop a financial model, prepare the pitch deck, look for investors, create investor documents, write an operating agreement and staff your opening team.
Brand Management
If the distributor’s dilemma is that they are destined to serve two masters - the supplier and the customer - then the brand management team is at the very center of the distribution equation. Like the fulcrum of a seesaw, brand management must balance the needs of both suppliers and sales teams. They are likewise, obligated to serve both constituencies. Most importantly, brand management should be turning supplier objectives into sales strategies.
Creating a Blueprint for Success
Whether you are starting from scratch, forming a business with an idea and a lot of ambition or you’ve been in business for fifty years, you should have a framework of ideas which you strive for every day and which, when followed, will lead your business to success. This is your vision, which when properly laid out, will inform your culture, your processes and your strategy for success.
Creating a Mission Statement
There are three questions you need to answer in order to develop a mission statement, which will be the touchstone of the culture you build for your organization. Although all three are important, it’s the “why” of business strategy which is the most important. By this, I mean: What is your purpose? What is your cause? What is your belief? Why do you get out of bed in the morning and why should anyone care?
Seminars and Tutorials
Distributor Sales Management
Module 1 – Culture
According to Gallup, the best run companies all have one thing in common: their employees are engaged. Engagement means employees are invested in their work relationship. As the leader of a team or organization, you bear the responsibility for the health of that relationship. Your role as a coach and mentor is more important than your role as the “boss”. An engaged workforce is more productive, more entrepreneurial, focused on your team goals and fulfilling the company mission. We can help you build a culture that engages everyone towards one goal - your success.
Account and Territory Management
One million dollars. That’s about how much top line revenue you need to support a commissioned or salaried sales person in this industry, in the northeastern United States, at break even. Other regions of the country generally work out to be less. No matter who you are, if you’re expanding sales territories, think about them like they’re each a “startup”, and each territory is a new business unit. Understand that relationships are more important than geography and that different markets often mean you need to adopt different “marketing”.
Productivity and Time Management
It’s surprising to find out how many of your employees do not have a concept of time management and how it affects everyone around them. Someone who squanders their own time is generally not aware of how they do the same to those around them. Beyond teaching the “Four Intentions of Time Management” we emphasize how the 80/20 rule dominates our time management and therefore our productivity as well. Getting a grip on priorities and goals helps underscore the critical need for time management in enhancing productivity.
The lessons that comprise this program are the culmination of a lifetime of selling, managing, and communicating. We’ve taken what we have learned and practiced first hand, and rolled it into a set of presentations designed to effectively direct employees towards improved performance, and lead sales and management people in the direction of life-long learning and self-improvement.
Distributor Sales Management
Module 2 – Process
The best organizations have cohesive, consistent, processes which serve the customer, not the organization. Your sales process, your brand acquisition process, your marketing process, should all have one common goal - to sell more of your products to more people. If you’re making rules and procedures that make your job and your employees jobs easier, you’re not focusing on the customers or your suppliers. Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, explains that as a companies grow, it becomes easier to rely on the process rather than the result. Learn how to avoid this fatal mistake.
Embracing the Sales Process
Relationship selling is more important than ever in the world of wine. But most salesreps don’t understand what underlies the process. Underneath the eight steps in the basic sales process is the understanding of why you do what you do. Simon Sinek says that “The goal is not just to sell to people who need what you have; the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it and what you do simply proves what you believe.” This is one of the key tenets of successful selling.
Distributor Sales Management
Module 3 – Strategy
Turn supplier goals into executable sales plans. Think about it. This is your primary function as a wholesale distributor. It’s your job to take your suppliers goals and ambitions – what they want to do in the market - and work out an executable sales and marketing plan, tailored to your territory, which will get the supplier to their stated goals. There are dozens of tools you can use to do this. We teach you strategies to help you get there and how to build a “distributor toolbox” to make sure you execute on this primary function.
More Effective Meetings
According to a recent Gallup survey, 15% of a company's time is dedicated to meetings. In fact, senior executives spend two days or more a week in them, even though they consider 67% of meetings to be "failures." The problem isn’t that you’re having too many meetings, it’s that you’re holding ineffective meetings. If you want employees to get excited about meetings, you have to engage everyone at the meeting. Knowing what's expected of you at work is fundamental to engagement. Your meeting can help fulfill that requirement -- and people participate more when they know what you want from them.
““There is absolutely no better feeling going into a game than knowing that you are thoroughly prepared.” ”