The fundamental goal ofCRMis to improve your relationship with your winery's customers which in turn improves customer retention and repeat sales to drive growth.

Whilst there are many CRM solutions available, wineries have some very specific business process needs which are often not addressed by generic solutions without costly customisation. For example, most wineries need their CRM to help them improve their Cellar Door data capture, facilitate Wine Club Memberships and manage events or experiences while others will also want to manage Reseller and Distributor relationships.

Contact management is core to a CRM including personal details, purchase history, wine club subscriptions as well as personal preferences and demographic tags, communications they’ve received and responded to. They often include sales reporting and marketing information plus website traffic and cellar door POS sales.

Vendors who claim to have a CRM offering for the wine industry includevinCreative, Wine Direct, Blackboxx, CRU, Troly, Salesforce, and Ezywine. All these products have varying levels of functionality - receive product demonstrations to decide and opt for an ‘all-in-one’ unified solution over disparate ‘hub and spoke’ products so you have a 360-degree view of all business data.

Another method of holding contact information is in anaccounting systemwith online products such as Xero, Quickbooks or MYOB, and offline such as Exo. An accounting system allows you to track purchase history and lifetime value, however, no marketing or sales information is stored as your operational team does not have access to these systems. 

A mail list ormarketing automation systemsuch as Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor will provide you the ability to segment lists, send newsletters and manage campaigns, but they are not a CRM solution. This also means your customer's data is in multiple locations which could quickly become out of date without regular upkeep.

APOS systemwill track cellar door sales, inventory, and loyalty programs however they do not manage the entire customer life cycle. Examples of these are Revel, Bepoz, F2 Onsite, and PBSA. 

For a winery to best manage their customers they should be able to segment their database and then personalise the content on their website, in their newsletters, and telesales campaigns. A CRM should allow all staff to access business-wide information in real-time.

Awinery specific software solutionshould empower wineries to make better business decisions based on a complete 360-degree view of the data, sales, and customer engagement. It should be designed to help you sell more wine, to more people, more often and at higher margins.