Technology raising the bar on wine pricing strategies

(NBBJ) - Social media has been a hot wine industry technology topic in the past few years, but little attention has been put on modernizing the sharing of media with more direct bottom-line impact, including pricing analysis and sales materials, according to experts at a major conference on high tech for the industry.

How wine is priced can affect as much as two-thirds of winery revenue, but a number of producers in the industry largely don’t take a coordinated approach to price optimization throughout the organization, according to one panel of sales analysts and economics experts at the Wine Industry Technology Symposium in Napa. The event drew about 200 industry professionals early last week.

By not using software that centralizes and standardizes sales and pricing data and analysis, the producer can “leak” profit to distribution and retail tiers, not predict revenue accurately enough and potentially have unintended results from pricing changes.

“I’m shocked how many distributors are still using Excel for pricing and the system of record,” said Chris Spear, vice president of business solutions for Novato-based depletion data service TradePulse.

Problem is, it’s a manual process of recording information and calculating wholesaler chargebacks, often in a host of spreadsheets, multiplying with the scale of the wine company and the number of trade accounts and markets.

“When I started at Trinchero (Family Estates), there were thousands of spreadsheets,” said panelist Mark Barichievich, director of sales administration.

That made finding the deepest deal or what was selling at a given retailer quite difficult and time-consuming, he told the gathering of a couple dozen information technology professionals in the audience. It would take three months after a company pricing meeting to get data into the enterprise resource planning software, then it would be time for another pricing meeting.