Wine Marketing and Sales Third Edition Strategic Planning Tools and Teaching Supplement: PDF Slide Decks 1-25

General description of slide presentations, written by co-author Paul Wagner, founder of Balzac Communications, whose clients include some of the most important wine brands in the world. Complete table of contents follow the description.

"These lectures are numbered more or less according to the chapters of Wine Marketing & Sales.  They are not always directly related to all the material in the book, and also feature some supplementary content.  In other words, these lectures help put the book into context, explain its themes, are seamlessly adaptable to courses which assign the book as a main text; but also can be used as stand alone outlines for sales and marketing meetings, and teaching tools for staff trainings. 

"Over the years, I have learned that most people in the business of wine have completely missed a key component of marketing:  that to do marketing well, you have to do something different to stand out from the crowd.  And in wine, the crowd is huge!  So much of the focus of these lectures is to challenge people to think beyond their usual focus, which is that good wine sells itself.  It doesn’t. 

"The slide decks are numbered by class meeting.

"Deck 1 begins with a basic business plan challenge:  to write a business plan you need to know how much wine you have to sell, and where you are going to sell it.  I give particular emphasis to WHERE, account by account, will that wine be sold?  There is no such thing at the “general market.”  There are only accounts, and if you can sell one case to one account, then you will need 1,000 accounts to sell 1,000 cases. If each visitor to your tasting room buys two bottles, you will need 6,000 visitors to sell 1,000 cases.  Where will you get those visitors?

"Deck 1A really focuses on the US market:  what’s going on, and where is there opportunity.  If you don’t know the market, you can’t do marketing.  And I like to use the Wayne Gretsky analogy:  don’t go where the hockey puck is now, go to where it is going to be!

"Deck 2: The essence of branding, and the importance of taking control of that issue.  You need to know what you want your brand to be and be mindful of that branding with everything that you do. 

"And so forth.  There are lots of options here, and I often select one or more of these (you can see that by the numbering) for any given class.  There may not be a slide deck for each lecture, but there are certainly enough to provide a lecture for each class meeting in an 18 week semester, with plenty left over. And there is particular emphasis on tasting rooms, visitors centers, and direct-to-consumer sales, because that’s where the market is headed in the future, at least for wineries under 10,000 cases. 

"I’d make a particular emphasis on 11 & 11a—how to sell wine.  No other wine certification or education program addresses the issue of how to sell, and it’s the only thing you really need to know to create a career in the wine industry. 

"Finally, the slides on evaluation is crucial.  All too often, marketing is done without any metrics to measure its effectiveness. These slides try to address that issue.

"The final file is a list of links to YouTube videos about wine that are amusing, thoughtful or silly marketing attempts.  I use them to illustrate points…or just to keep my audience engaged."