Q2 planning for wineries tends to focus on getting ready for summertime traffic. With most pandemic travel restrictions lifted, it promises to be a robust season for Tasting Room and DTC activity.

This is great news. It may also be slightly terrifying.

Are you ready for this?

Here is the single best action you can take, to be sure you make the most of Q2 in 2022:

Prepare your team to gather accurate data about your customers.

We talk about this a lot, and we can’t underscore it more emphatically.

Why?

Because accurate, complete data about customers is an incredibly valuable way to maximize future revenue.

Your next question, reasonably, is how to do a better job of gathering that data.

A few ideas I’ve heard recently:

• Incentivize Tasting Room staff with some pretty sweet rewards

• Set up friendly competitions around accuracy and completeness of new customer information

• Make a game of it. Create old-school style, hand-written “intake cards” that guests can complete while their purchase is rung up

• Reward the guests themselves when their profile is complete

There are lots of creative ways to go about it.

Above all, please dedicate time and attention during Q2 to creating a plan that is realistic for your winery.

It’s the single most important thing you can do for future growth.

Please let us know how we can help. To brainstorm ideas for a plan, for example, or to identify gaps in your current data, or to fix the data that isn’t as clean or complete as it could be.

I look forward to your thoughts on this, and thank you as always for reading —

Cathy