Breaking Though to Major Wine Labels in Napa and Sonoma
In spite of numerous attempts, the company had been consistently frustrated in its efforts to sell closures to the largest U.S. wine labels. The CEO challenged a second team with developing a strategy for penetrating this strategically important segment that actually worked.
As a start, the team set a goal of generating actual sales to three of the top 15 largest labels – none of whom had ever bought closures from them.
Since large buyers typically have a 6-18 month cycle to test new closures, this goal represented a steep hurdle, and the CEO was skeptical: “There’s no way they can do this. I’ll be happy if they can get one of the big companies to buy.”
In fact they landed four. In 100 days.
They started by developing alternative approaches to virtually every element of the buying process, from who they contacted to how they positioned their product and the company. These new approaches engaged a broader set of stakeholders at target accounts, generating deeper understanding of how their closures could add value to major accounts’ business goals. And they were able to partner with customers to shorten the sales cycle, challenging long-held assumptions about the length of time major accounts needed to make purchase decisions.