From Distillery Gates to Global Markets: Launching Your Sales Strategy
With their first bottled spirits gleaming on the shelves, David, Biebod Distillery’s Sales & Marketing Manager, felt the exhilarating pressure of bringing their liquid gold to market. Anya, the CEO, was eager to see their brand expand, but the questions loomed: Who would buy it? How much could we sell it for? Had we produced enough all those years ago?
The challenge was multifaceted. Should we focus on direct-to-consumer sales at the brand home? E-commerce? Distributors? Wholesale? Or direct relationships with the on-trade and off-trade? Each channel presented its own complexities, pricing tiers and managing them disparately would quickly lead to chaos. Building a consistent brand message and tracking performance across these varied routes was a significant hurdle. Furthermore, as the sales team grew, ensuring new hires could hit the ground running with all necessary customer data and processes was a constant concern.
Example Customer page showing configurable tagged data and easy click-through management of orders and outstandings ::
The integrated CRM, Sales, Point of Sale (POS), and Inventory modules under MasterDistiller x Odoo became David’s command center. All sales channels were covered, providing a single source of truth for customer interactions, order management and stock availability.
David could now build a robust product architecture with core products and sub-variants, crucial for managing international orders and diverse label requirements for different export markets. This ensured that whether a customer was in London or Tokyo, they received the right product with the correct local details ,at the right price.
The system allowed for seamless management of multiple channels with sales team, channel and salesperson tracking, providing Anya with clear insights into individual, team and market performance. Pricelists could be built in to give appropriate guardrails and autonomy to the sales team, ensuring consistent pricing while allowing for on the ground flexibility. And for those influencers, David could easily track the volume and price of sample bottles sent out, ensuring they were getting the clicks and podcast subscribers they had dreamt of and quickly update his distributor’s depletion rates for a combined view of that critical pace of sell-through to end consumers.
Biebod Distillery could easily bottle, track, and build limited and exclusive releases with configurable product categories and variants to help build those custom label requirements. The system also managed cask allocations with status updates, ensuring that a promised single cask to a Tier “A” outlet did not get snapped up or tipped into a vat until the samples had arrived and the customer had committed.
Early Wins that Compound :: The early win of establishing a robust CRM in Part 1, and continually building it up through cask sales in Part 2, now truly compounded. David’s sales team could hit the ground running with all customer interactions, preferences, and historical data centrally managed. This meant new sales team members could be onboarded faster, becoming productive within days instead of weeks, leading to quicker market penetration and revenue generation. The consistent data from production and bottling (Part 4) also fed directly into sales, ensuring accurate stock availability and costing for every order, preventing overselling or mispricing.
With our sales strategy taking shape our team is ready to hit the streets. What about optimising their routes, navigating the complexities of international trade, and giving our customers unparalleled insight into and connection with their purchases? The journey to truly global sales continues in our next chapter…
Ready to explore how MasterDistiller x Odoo can help your distillery navigate the future?