One of the biggest challenges faced by distilleries is predicting the market demand for a product. This is because the sales and marketing teams need to predict the spirits market 5, 10 and sometimes even 15 years in advance due to the maturation process.
Doing this well can have a big impact on the company’s profits, popularity, and relevance for years to come. Cofficient’s Distillery Management Software (DMS) provides distillers with more information which can be very useful when planning ahead. Here are some of the ways that DMS can better inform your sales and marketing strategy:
Track past sales records
With an end-to-end DMS, you can easily track all your past sales data. Distillery Managers or sales and marketing teams can easily use this data to identify market trends. Using this information, you can easily predict market demand for certain products at certain points of the year and can use data to forecast for coming months and years. For example, if sales records show that a certain spirit is declining in popularity but distillers have alot of it in stock, distilleries can increase marketing messaging on this product and increase demand. This is vital in order for a healthy cash flow and ensure good turnover of stock levels.
Have an overview of your resources
DMS allows you to know exactly how much resource you have for the coming years, how many barrels you have, what they contain, and how far along the maturation process they are. This means sales and marketing teams can assess market trends alongside the distillery’s capabilities. If they identify an approaching demand for more mature spirits with depth, they can see which barrels they have available to make a blend.
They might identify there is a shortage of one of the main components for a product, so they can boost their marketing efforts to raise awareness and market profile of another spirit. When all this information is used together, distilleries can sway marketing demand for a product at the time when it is ready to be sold. This ensures business profitability, keeps stakeholders and investors happy and ensures that you have adequate market share.
Cofficient has built a unique DMS on the NetSuite platform which has all of these capabilities, and more! Want to learn more? Contact us today to see how we could help.
