2023 Tech Picks for the Wine Business

This has been a great year for tech advancement. Aside from all the excitement and fear surrounding potential developments in Artificial Intelligence (if you want to really be stressed, read "The Coming Wave" by Mustafa Suleyman), in the wine business, our daily operational lives have been greatly enhanced by advancements in current software. That is, if we’re properly utilizing and employing this software to support our teams and connect with our customers. In my more than 25 years in the wine business, I don’t think there has been any other time as exciting as the present for realizing cost reductions and maximizing productivity with the aid of business function software.

At Star Lane & Dierberg Vineyards, we’ve narrowed in on certain programs that help the company broadly while also employing specialized programs that are department specific. The following are my picks for those that have had the greatest impact across the entire organization, or that have the potential to bring us closer to the customer:

1.           Slack: Still my pick for having the greatest positive impact on business communication and providing greater connectivity across a large estate with various physical work locations. The issue of cohesive communication within a company is age-old, and Slack offers a solution that is long overdue. If you’re not using this program, think of Slack as a replacement for the company bulletin board, a way to reduce the log jam and productivity drain of internal email, and (when used properly) a new way to connect people across functional areas and give everyone insight into the activity and impact of their teammates, bosses, and stake holders. Slack provides an actual solution to the problem of “silos” and barriers that all companies fight to reduce. In terms of the perennial issue of connecting outside sales teams to inside operations teams, Slack provides an opportunity to bridge that gap. Slack allows a field sales team member to see real-time communication and images about the harvest while they’re preparing for a sales call in Denver, for example, or for the harvest team to get instant news and images of that salesperson’s success in connecting the literal fruits of their labor with a new customer. Likewise, Slack allows the sales organization to communicate across channels: the Tasting Room team can post about signing up new club members and handling a fun but busy day at the winery, while the export team shares pictures of sales success in Japan.

A word of warning: no software, Slack included, changes human behavior. In fact, it amplifies it. But it may help managers identify cultural issues faster and better than former siloed communication mediums. If you have a culture problem of finger-pointing, infighting, and complaining, Slack will amplify this like an exponential megaphone. However, if you’re fostering a culture of cooperation, support, and celebrating each other’s victories, Slack can be a great tool in connecting your team and building camaraderie.

PS: I’m looking forward to seeing Salesforce continue integration with Slack and excited about the CRM potential.

2.           Google Workspace: We’re a very large estate but essentially a small business, so the advantage of an integrated business functionality platform such as Google Workspace is that it puts the IT control of the organization in the hands of the managers in a no-code environment. Getting new employees up and running with the basics is fast and easy. Beyond the basics, we’ve been finding that the real-time workflow of Google Docs and Google Sheets is giving Excel and Dropbox a run for their money. To be sure, the capabilities of Excel and its critical place in the financial and operational management of the small business have certainly not been usurped, but for information sharing, Google’s platform is my choice. Colleagues can work in documents in real time, and I’m looking forward to a day when we can fold trade customers into this workflow. Again, Microsoft and others have similar capabilities—Dropbox does have a real-time workflow option—but if you’re using Google Workspace, the advantages of migrating basic spreadsheets and documents over to Google Drive and working on them with your colleagues in that space have become more and more compelling to us as an organization. If you’ve been curious about trying this out and have been frustrated by the common issue of competitive software platforms not talking to each other, you can bridge the gap with a little studying. For instance, Google does have a setting option to carry over cell formulas from Excel through a cut and paste to Google Sheets. Some retraining is certainly required here, but we see ourselves moving more in this direction.

3.           LinkedIn: No, I’m not including this so that my article gets more attention. That’s not the point of the article, and if you’ve been studying the evolution of LinkedIn since the platform was acquired by Microsoft, you’d know that such blatant self-promotion attempts are picked out quickly by LinkedIn’s algorithms and not in a positive way. The former recruitment-centric social media platform has been evolving quickly this past year into a preferred space for professional social interaction. While we are still working to ramp up and maximize our marketing tactics on the essential Meta platforms where most of our DTC customers interact with us and each other, LinkedIn is becoming a space that is important for B2B communication in a manner that goes beyond product pitching. Sure, it’s an obvious platform for generating B2B leads in sales (I’ve been experimenting with their Sales Navigator CRM functionality), but again, direct selling and pitching is not favored by the platform, and it limits reach. A great example of effective use of LinkedIn are some of the posts by Tim Moore of RNDC celebrating his team and giving them a voice and exposure beyond the walls of the warehouse and office in a medium that didn’t exist before the emergence of this platform. (For a good orientation on this subject, I recommend listening to Michael Stelzner’s podcast Social Media Marketing with his guest Richard van der Blom from the August 31st episode of this year).

I plan to dig in more with LinkedIn in 2024 with our marketing team and understand how we can better connect with customers and colleagues. One example is an idea our president & winemaker has of sharing information from the production team within the platform where fellow wineries and customers could interact and learn. If you saw our viticulturist’s award as a leader in Wine Business Magazine’s 2023 Wine Industry Leaders edition, you know that we’re all about gathering and sharing data that can help the region and industry. It seems LinkedIn will be the place where marketing can really move past product-centricity and into customer-centricity for luxury wineries, and I’m excited to see if that notion is proved true.

I hope everyone had a strong close to 2023, and I’m wishing all friends, colleagues, and customers the greatest success in 2024 and beyond!

Cheers, Peter