Sometimes it’s necessary to strip away all the preconceived notions about how to succeed in an industry, reshuffle roles, and take an untraditional approach to change things for the better. That’s even true—maybe especially true—in industries as steeped in tradition as winemaking.
Typically, there are three groups involved in winemaking:
- The winemakers,
- The distributors, and
- The customers.
The dominant business model isn’t working well for two parties—the winemakers and customers. Distributors make enormous profits, but winemakers are barely able to make a living at all, and customers are getting ripped off with huge markups at retail outlets.
At NakedWines.com, we knew there had to be a better way—and we knew it had to start with how we trained our people.
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Paying Salespeople Not to Sell
We had an idea that sounded crazy at first—what if we stopped paying our sales people to sell? Instead of training sales sharks who specialize in finding somebody who is ready to buy directly from a winemaker and intervening in that sale to get a nice commission, what if we trained them to be sales shepherds instead?
The training was designed to create shepherds who would know how to find customers who aren’t interacting with their winemakers (a telltale sign that they’re about to leave the fold) and identify and resolve their issues so they remain happy with us. It generally costs more to bring a new customer on board than to keep a current customer engaged and satisfied, and happy customers make the best sales team on the planet, so this crazy idea made sense to us.
From a practical standpoint, the sales shepherd approach meant training sales teams to identify patterns of behavior that show customer unhappiness. You see that somebody had a bad delivery experience and hasn’t visited the website recently? Reach out and make sure they’re alright. Make things better by crediting their shipping. See if they’ll give us another shot. If you handle the situation correctly, you’ll usually turn them around and create a fan for life! So our sales people receive training and incentives to take care of a customer group and make sure it stays healthy. Selling comes easy after that.
Ryan O’Connell is a twenty-something French transplant winemaker and the marketing manager at NakedWines.com.
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In tomorrow’s Advisor, we’ll learn more about training in a nontraditional way, and we’ll showcase a comprehensive online training library of interactive courses on dozens of key HR topics.