We spend quite a lot of time here on data-driven insights into consumer behavior around wine, mainly derived from third party platforms and communities where consumers engage and interact every day and around the world. (Last week's post from the USBevX conference, with a focus on East Coast wineries, was a fun and local example.)

Today I’d like to shift gears and focus on a different set of insights derived from a different set of data, that is, the data that a wine business already has.

Every wine business has its internal data, from any number of origins: viticultural operations, for example, or the Direct To Consumer (DTC) program, or sales and depletion records.

Most of the time that data is raw data, and it is housed in spreadsheet format or pivot tables. In that format it can be difficult to access or utilize the intelligence the data contains because it’s hidden somewhere down in line 11,573.

As an individual record, it doesn't mean much. But visualize it as an aggregate with the appropriate filters, and now we're getting somewhere.

There's a much better way than all those lines in all those spreadsheets, and it doesn't involve a full-time analyst or mathematician.

Our team builds interactive dashboards, which accomplish two things: 1) they visualize the data and bring the insights into the light of day allowing you to make well informed business decisions, and 2) it happens in “real time.”

This week and for the next few weeks, we're going to take a look at an interactive DTC dashboard that we built. The dashboard helps DTC managers oversee and thoroughly understand their DTC business as it is happening. (The images you're looking at in this post uses fictitious data.)  

This week we'll look at how KPIs are visualized. In the coming weeks we'll look at SKU margin and financial operations.

Key Performance Indicators

Let's start with KPIs, which this particular winery's DTC leadership team identified for themselves and prioritized for us.

The data can be updated in real time by using a direct connection to the DTC system, or it can be updated on a regularly scheduled basis when using spreadsheets.

Note: Privacy is, naturally, a concern, particularly when it comes to a winery's hard-won customer lists and identifying information. Our team implements several levels of encryption to ensure the highest level of security. 

The winery's DTC team now has a 100,000 foot view of their operations, and they can drill in to each one of the KPIs by simply clicking on it. Click on the YTD to Budget KPI, for example, and details on why overall performance is down are displayed this way:

It becomes immediately obvious that especially tasting room and club revenues are causing major shortfalls but also online channels are not performing as expected. Additional real time filters can be applied by month, channel, wine type or bottle size, and also by geographical area or other valuable dimensions.

It's a fresh, more granular way to visualize your company's own data. It's the nuts and bolts of things, and synchronizing their operation optimizes the whole machine of your business so that you can make real-time adjustments where need be.

Can we help you with this? I'd be very glad to talk it through.

Thank you as always for reading --