On the heels of a good telemarketing discussion in a recent WISE Academy session, as well as the blog we posted last week on tele-marketing, I had a chance to chat with Mark Parton, Founder & President of Call for Wine. For many small- to medium-sized wineries, the challenge isn't in having a good product to sell, or in having a good story to tell; it's in having enough TIME to make the connections with your customers and build a strong and trusting relationship. Call for Wine provides a solution for helping build those critical relationships through telephone outreach and conversation.

Customers joined your mailing list because they are interested in learning more about your brand or products; they agreed to make a connection, or initiate a relationship. Telemarketing is a great way to nurture that relationship and help provide customers with the connection they're seeking. I enjoyed my conversation with Mark and thought it may be beneficial for others to learn a little about them, as well.

WHO'S CALL FOR WINE?

An outbound tele-marketing firm specifically for the wine industry. They've been in business for over 6 years, with 2 call center locations (Northern CA and AZ), and 45 “seats” -- or staffers -- actively calling on behalf of winery clients. Primarily servicing wineries in the Northern CA area, they are helping several well-known wineries grow their direct businesses.

The CFW staff is trained and educated in wine; they run on-going internal training sessions, as well as invite winery clients to come into their offices and train the sales staff on the brands and products they’re helping bring to their customers.

WHAT DO THEY DO?

Outbound calling to customers on winery mailing lists
Call lists utilized are primarily purchasers from a winery’s wine club, tasting room, online or event participation lists. CFW does not conduct cold calling. They recommend calling customers no more than 2-3x per year, in order to help nurture - and not overwhelm - the winery's relationship with that customer.  They will only sell a winery’s wine to that winery’s customer list; no cross-list sharing between clients or cold calling is conducted.

Data hygiene
Cleaning up your customer contact list is critical. CFW helps by making the initial contact and confirming all phone, mailing and other information is correct. They de-dup lists for basic clean up and conduct NCOA processing, two standard data hygiene practices that many businesses overlook.

Data appending
In an initial customer outreach, CFW will ask for any missing email addresses or phone numbers to append to a winery's contact list; a valuable addition, as the cost to market online or by phone is considerably cheaper (and can be more valuable) than traditional direct mail outreach.

Outbound operational contacts
It's critical that wine club managers have up-to-date credit card information for all customers prior to running a club batch. CFW will contact customers with expired or declined credit cards and return updated and valid information for 40-60% of an invalid contact list. 

WHAT ELSE DO THEY DO?

Uncover new sales opportunities for clients
By learning from their outreach and customer conversations, CFW is able to suggest to clients new and potentially effective campaigns that will help service their customers and sell more wine.

Work directly with service providers like AMS, Nexternal and eWinery to update winery customer and order information directly into a winery's existing database; critical for real-time customer views and consistency of data.

WHAT RESULTS DO WINERY'S TYPICALLY SEE?

The chart on the right shows average statistics for CFW clients in 2009.

For more information on Call for Wine, visit their website at www.callforwine.com or call Mark Parton at 800.946.3705.