What 1% increase in spending will sell you more wine?

Depends. The answer is not by increasing the quality of your wine. With the one exception of moving from a Parker rating of 89 to 90, there is very little chance that you can find any benefit to a 1% increase in wine quality leading to a measured increase in wine sales. Yet wineries everyday will spend thousands and thousands of dollars/euros to make it happen on things such as: a new bladder press that presses the grapes even more gently, a consulting winemaker to come in and tweak the style of their wines, or maybe a whole set of new fermentation tanks just because the current ones are not quite the right shape to attain maximum extraction. All of these I’ve seen implemented by wineries struggling to sell more wine. Each time the winery was looking for a way to get more people to buy there wine. Each example above from what I can tell has led to bigger bank debt and the same amount of wine being sold.

What did each winery also have in common? A website that didn’t work. A label that was hard to read, and an export department that didn’t speak English.

So the answer to the question above to what the 1% increase in spending might help these wineries to sell more wine, is not making the wine better. Each winery I’m thinking of makes fine wines that taste good and are very commercially viable. They just didn’t want to spend any money on things that they couldn’t touch, or that involved unknowns. New wine press, no problem, I can see that and touch it and all is good! New online social media campaign? Well, I don’ t think that that will help much plus I don’t understand it.

Understanding something though is not a prerequiste for needing something.

I don’t understand how the hard drive on my desk remembers what I put in it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need it. I buy it, and use it, because it is useful. Social media, and a functioning website today are not optional winery tools, they are as essential as your destemming machine, that is if you want to sell more wine.

Turns out that even a 1% increase in a wineires sales, marketing, or online engagemnet budget I believe will make a difference, if not a very large one. If you have the courage I dare you to try.

An example: What is your annual operating budget for your winrey? 250,000euros? 500,000? More? Less? We’ll start with the first one, which gives us at 1%, 2,500 euros. Now take that money and go out and hire a professional, not a relative who took a weekend class in webdesign or English, to sit down with you and teach you about Twitter, Facebook, or even help build your first blog. For that 2,500 euros, and a bit of shopping around, I bet you could get a new website and some in house training. Maybe not the best website, but you could trade that in for a Facebook fanpage, some Twitter help and more in house training. Now you’re set.

Then let’s  spend 1% of your time each week playing with it. That’s 15 minutes a day.

2,500 euros of social media education and initiatives + 15 minutes a day = a lot more wine sold. Guaranteed. Or rather you won’t sell any less wine. You can only gain.

Simply by getting out there and talking to consumers and promoting yourself online, you will sell more. The social part of getting out there won’t be tangible, but your selling wine will be. What have you got to lose? With the crisis here in Europe affecting sales daily wineries can’t afford not to try.

Ryan Opaz