Whether it is DTC or Wholesale within the winery or craft spirits business sector, sales performance is critical for the business. A winery or craft spirits business is no more than a hobby for many, but with “customers” it really is a business. Approaching the winery or craft spirits business requires a different way of thinking. How does one design the strategy for the business that provides a data driven machine towards increasing sales? The discernable answer is by tracking and using metrics or data analytics. While it is not easy, the main step into designing a strategy that is successfully using data points for optimization is by defining your key performance indicators or KPI’s.

For any winery or craft spirits producer DTC often is the lifeline for revenues. For example, wineries who produce less than 100,000 cases or less of product per annum, at least 30-70% of sales revenues can be derived from DTC channel. In smaller wineries or craft spirits, DTC often can be 100% of the revenue stream. In either scenario, most wineries or craft businesses have a basic understanding of KPI’s in relation to their sales channels do look at such as revenue by channel, revenue by month, number of club members, and total cases sold. That is usually it. But, what other data points could be utilized to give a better “picture” of what your winery or craft spirits business is doing?

Many wineries or craft spirits businesses are missing out on data that could improve their sales. What are those other KPI’s to take note of? In the tasting room or lounge model there are several data points to observe starting with visitor source. How did your visitor come to your establishment? Are they returning customers, club members, guests of club members, or did a hotel or restaurant refer them? Did you place an add in a travel/tourism magazine or Groupon offer? With this data you are gleaning information to see if your marketing dollars are effective in bringing in new customers.

Another tasting room metric is what is your visitor conversion rate? Are your visitors becoming customers? Was a purchase made? Did they join the club? Who served the visitor? Data from these questions can help you as a manager/owner determine who needs more training, who is better with one-time sales versus repeat sales, and who are the team members reaching the daily, weekly, monthly goals set.

In the tasting room or lounge also consider the time to assess the average sales amount and the sales per person amount. The average sales metric is factored as net dollars divided by the number of people for the day. This data gives you detail as to are the visitors buying more than last visit? Does the average amount per person or the average sales amount fluctuate with seasonality or abrupt weather events? This data can point to offering specials or deals during seasonal down time or offers the manager insights in immediate response strategizes to conduct a telemarketing campaign or email offer to supplement the low seasonal shifts in per person sales or average sales for the day.

Club programs also have their own set of KPI’s. Focused KPI’s include attrition rate, club loyalty and market basket analysis. Club members do sometimes move on as they like variety. Tracking attrition rate can help you as the owner or manager determine trends, such as who is leaving and when. What did they purchase before they left? This metric can help to identify trends to reveal you need to do other things to keep more customers in the club. How long is the average membership is monitored with tracking club loyalty. What is the average purchase amount for any member in a year? What is the average lifetime value? These metrics help you to better understand the customers you have so you can design programs to serve your club members better. Finally, one key to increasing sales is the ability to upsell or make the proper recommendations. Conducting a basket analysis will help you to understand what items your customers purchase together. An example of this, is Amazon, who mentions “frequently purchased together” in the hopes you will add more items to your cart. This KPI can be very useful for not only the club, but ecommerce and retail DTC marketing mix programs.

These are just a few of the KPI’s that any winery or craft spirits business can start to utilize. You need to bring together all your data points to give you a compete look into your DTC operations. When you have a complete automated system to manage all your data points, in one place, you would, essentially, find the “easy button” in your reports to give you better detail. You can make better decisions with data, because you have better insights for your winery or craft spirits business. Ask how ACTIVE can help with your winery or craft spirits business to improve your data capture management, so you can make better business decisions through KPI’s. www.activeclubsolutions.com