This week has been full of fun running around in Napa Valley. I have watched the process of so many wineries and how they have these great systems of bringing you in to taste and buy their wines.
I remember back in my Amway days of hearing the stories of how the retail system was dying; how people were looking in other places to find the goods and services they needed for life. I was reminded of that this week as I saw firsthand how great wineries sell to their guests in the same way the many information marketers do: they build a list of interested buyers and market to them.
We can all walk into almost any supermarket and find good bottles of wine. We take them home and enjoy them with our favorite meals. But have you ever been to the winery and tasted the wine a few hundred feet from where it was made?
We have fun parties are our home where we ask guests to bring a bottle of wine to share with the group. Then we create a great tasting event and enjoy many choices that others pick. But most of them are from a store; they pick them up at a local market and bring them to the party.
My wife and her family have a stronger love for wines than I do, but I have the idea of how to taste a good wine from them and from my education in learning to identify and savor the flavors when making a great cup of espresso or coffee.
Back to the marketing system, when you visit these places many of them have a club you can join. When you do, you get so many bottles of wine a year delivered to your home. You also get a discount price on any other purchases and, in today’s case, when we joined a club we received our tastings for free.
This happened because the winery created a great experience for us and offered us the chance to continue enjoying their wines – which we can’t get back in Dallas because they aren’t distributed there – at home. And, of course, we loved the wines themselves.
So how is your business model for reaching your clients? What are you doing to get the personal contact with them to share some value and let them invest in you and your business?
There’s more to come from California tomorrow including our radio show live from the Bay Area at 11:00 am Central time; 9:00 am Pacific.
I’m Tim Gillette, the Rocker Life Coach. It’s time to live your dream to love what you do and those you share life with. Are you ready to make the change to become the RockStar in your world?
