Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/70680
MARKETING consults wine businesses looking to market their wines online and wine tech companies looking to market their prod- ucts to wineries. Mabray has noticed a trend in the wine industry of using CRM data to build lists and market to them, a tactic he describes as "reactive." "What's missing in the in- dustry is actionable CRM," Mabray said. "Whatever platform you're interacting with the consumer in, you need to be able to see patterns in that customer's purchas- ing and tasting behavior and myriad other details that make the gestalt of what the actual customer is." At that specific point of contact where the activity is happening, a winery representative must be able to act with the data in front of them. When considering CRM options, Mabray cautions that purchasing CRM software will not fix the weak link in a winery's DtC chain. "CRM is not a panacea. The software can't fix customer relationships, only people can." You have to have a unified effort toward customer service. CRM solutions must integrate well with point-of-sale (POS) and legacy systems such as QuickBooks or Excel. As a wine industry consultant, Mabray is a fan of software applications that are tailored to the unique needs of the wine industry. "Solutions have to organize three types of data into a meaningful record by marrying three systems: POS, wine club and ecommerce, ideally in a cloud-based computing service," he said. With cloud- based computing, everything is done online and hosted on a secure, remote server, eliminating the need for disks, mainte- nance or software updates. Customers can securely update their own records. An informative video about cloud computing can be found at greatvines.com. With an office in St. Helena, Calif., GreatVines is a Salesforce.com partner. Using the force.com platform, GreatVines has built a specific packaged CRM and analytics solution for the spirits, beer and wine industries, but it is direct-to-trade Differences between DtC & DtT sumers. Direct-to-trade (DtT) CRM is not as simple: It focuses on retailer, on-premise ac- counts, distributors and national accounts. DtC marketers reach out to their custom- D ers to convince them to buy their wines. DtT efforts focus on convincing a distributor to take and support their wines and for a re- tailer to bring it in. DtC CRM relies on a consumer's informa- tion such as personal purchase history and de- mographic. DtT CRM relies on trade sales data from syndicated sources like Nielsen, Bever- age Data Network and SymphonyIRI Group. Because DtT CRM deals with a broad spec- trum of people across the three-tier system, it tracks the actions taken: calls made, emails sent, prices quoted, etc. This type of CRM needs to address the added complexity and lack of visibility that comes from the winery not controlling the entire process. —K.K. 48 Wines & Vines MAY 201 1 irect-to-consumer (DtC) customer relationship management is strictly focused on marketing directly to con-