Like the author, I used to work in corporate technology and systems, and now help small wineries with sales and marketing and occasionally blog about it. This is a very well thought out article and should point the way for many wineries. Marketing segmentation and access to consumer data create competitive advantage. The issues I deal with when consulting very small producers are system scalability, proprietary platforms, maintaining interfaces with other applications and 3rd party vendors, training and of course cost of ownership. Cloud based systems offer low cost but potential issues with transaction response time and data security. I’d be very interested in hearing from other winery business analysts regarding their selection processes and experience with specific winery CRM systems.
Turning Wine into Publicity