Solving a generational problem in the beverage alcohol industry: Relationship Selling
Salespeople in the beverage alcohol industry are hard-working, well-intended and typically blessed with a great personality – allowing them to generate terrific personal rapport with their customers.
Yet those same salespeople are typically NOT prepared, NOT great listeners, NOT customer-focused, NOT strong at pitching, and NOT comfortable handling objections or closing. This suggests that they have NOT generated BUSINESS RAPPORT! There are fantastic salespeople in our industry – but if we’re honest, there’s a big opportunity for the industry to get much better at selling.
This reality creates a problem that’s existed in the beverage alcohol industry for generations: salespeople sell on relationship – leveraging their personal rapport. While it’s always a good idea to become friendly with our customers, it’s not going to maximize the influence we have with our customers. BUSINESS RAPPORT + personal rapport will maximize our influence.
Why does this problem persist in our industry? I have thought about this for over 40 years. I grew up in the industry, as my father spent his entire career in beverage alcohol. After college, I spent 6 years on the distributor side and 10 years on the supplier side of the business. My opinion on relationship selling includes both suppliers and distributors – neither tier is great at selling. Here are the reasons why:
1. Company onboarding doesn’t properly prepare our salespeople – every company has an approach to onboarding new sales employees – but most of the focus is on the operational and administrative ends of the company – not learning the selling fundamentals.
2. Sales Training isn’t a priority – “Best practice” companies spend $2000.00 on average per person annually on training. Another metric of progressive companies requires their employees to spend 5 hours per month or 6 days per year in training. Most companies fall far short of these recommendations.
3. Company or smaller team meetings are not being used for practice / training – Sales meetings are an excellent opportunity to incorporate practice (training) by having your salespeople role-play on select selling priorities. Unfortunately, most companies are not doing this – the agenda for these meetings are typically performance updates and encourage little to no engagement.
4. Lack of on-the-job training / coaching – Managers wear lots of hats and have lots of responsibilities. Many managers are not spending enough time working with their teams in the trade. Even when they are working together, nearly the entire focus is on auditing the account against company standards and competition. While this is important and always will be, there needs to be some equal time on auditing (and coaching) their approach / their selling behaviors.
5. The goal of training is often misunderstood – most people think the reason we are training our salespeople is to expose them to the fundamentals of selling. While learning and knowing the fundamentals is important – it can’t be the goal. The goal needs to be supporting our salespeople until they FORM HABITS ON THE FUNDAMENTALS OF SELLING. There is a big difference between learning the fundamentals and being able to execute or do the fundamentals. Forming HABITS requires companies to make a significant effort to get this accomplished.
6. Most beverage alcohol industry suppliers and distributors, culturally, have tolerated relationship selling – A great way to define culture is: Culture equals the behavior we promote and encourage PLUS the behavior we tolerate and allow. It’s my opinion we don’t promote the fundamentals and we tolerate relationship selling.
Now that we’ve outlined the problem, what’s the solution?
Practice, practice, and more practice!
Sounds simple…but it’s not. Even if we got our salespeople to start practicing at sales meetings, I’d be fearful that managers would be ill equipped to provide meaningful feedback. Practice without feedback, or worse, incorrect feedback would be highly counterproductive to your team’s development.
For salespeople to practice, we need to simulate an actual sales call. That, at a minimum requires someone to play the role of the salesperson and someone to play the role of the customer. Best case would be to add in a 3rd person, an observer or coach who can provide feedback once the role-play is finished.
Introducing The Fox Sales Academy AI assisted role-play tool
Training in the beverage business is about to make a dramatic change…for the better!
With AI, we can build an agent to play the role of the customer AND we can build an agent to play the role of the coach / manager. This allows the salesperson to practice in ways that were not possible before:
· At the salesperson’s convenience – doesn’t take up valuable meeting time
· Without the pressure of their peers watching – no one wants to get embarrassed
· The AI agent playing the customer role has been given information about the industry, the channel, the brands – plus pain points / needs they have for their business AND objections that they will give to the salesperson when they ask for order
· The AI agent playing the observer / coach has been given information about the process – what to look for and provides detailed feedback and an actual score so the salesperson can track their progress
Practice, which is essentially non-existent in our industry, can explode with this new technology. No longer will your team be forced to rely on relationship selling – they’ll be able to sell the value of your portfolio – significantly distancing themselves from your competition.
Companies already using this technology – including a number of Craft breweries, distributors, and two of the largest spirits companies in the world – are seeing their teams develop faster than ever. Here’s what two of our partners mentioned on this technology:
“Our brewery purchased Fox's AI sales role-playing tool, and it quickly became a valuable part of our sales training. The realistic beer industry scenarios, varying communication styles, and adjustable difficulty levels helped our team practice everything from product launches to sales fundamentals. It was easy to use, and the feedback from our team was overwhelmingly positive. Unlike traditional role-playing, which can feel awkward or unrealistic, this let our reps practice on their own time and repeat scenarios until they built confidence. I highly recommend this tool to any brewery looking to strengthen its sales team.”
— Ashley Pond, Director at Deschutes Brewery
“I am a strong advocate for Ai assisted coaching. We expanded our program because the pilot proved its value. Managers can't be in every field interaction, the platform gives sales teams consistent practice, instant feedback, and a safe environment to improve. Paired with manager coaching, it accelerates development and performance.”
— Tyson Fehr, Director of Sales Enablement and Training, Fifth Generation Distilled Spirits
Think about how much your team would improve if they were given a modest KPI to practice for 10-minutes once a week on a current selling objective?
Their confidence would skyrocket; their professionalism would skyrocket…and their ability to close more sales would skyrocket.
We have developed a “white glove” service approach for our clients that makes implementation very turnkey. The reporting dashboard makes it easy for your team to track progress and build momentum throughout the department.
This game-changing technology is available now and it’s affordable! Make this year and into 2027 the year you no longer tolerate relationship selling by supporting your team with this exciting new technology.