Mark Pope, 'Bounty Hunter' of Napa wines, is bringing his team of seasoned salespeople to local wineries with his new telemarketing operation. Photo: Ashley Teplin.
Napa, Calif. -- Mark Pope, Napa Valley’s well-known “Bounty Hunter” of wines, is now offering his expertise to upscale wineries for telesales. He’s started a company called Chatterbox Wine Marketing to act as persuasive sales agents over the phone to wine club members and other winery customers.
Chatterbox isn’t alone. Other companies have sprung up to serve the same need. They include
Provino Premium Wines in Santa Rosa,
Call for Wine in Oakland,
Vinteractive in Windsor, and
Wine Leverage in St. Helena.
One reason these services have become important is the weak market for high-end wines. “As economic conditions have collapsed for high-end wines, we need to make a special push,” says Lou Kapcsandy, owner/winemaker of 2,500-case Kapcsandy Family Winery in Yountville. “We can call some customers, but we are a small winery and our staff has many other things to do.”
Chatterbox and its competitors also focus. “We need their expertise; they are dedicated to this,” Kapcsandy adds.
If telephone sales seem backward in this era of Facebook, Twitter and e-commerce, wineries are signing up for one reason: It works. Personal calls from a winery or its reps are an effective way to sell wine, particularly to club members and others who know the winery.
Chappellett's general manager, Steve Tamburelli, says that outsourcing telemarketing to Chatterbox has worked well for his winery.
“It’s worked out well,” says Steve Tamburelli, general manager of 30,000-case Chappellet Vineyards in St. Helena, which uses the service.
Kapcsandy concurs. “We’ve very pleased with their work,” he says.
And so far, there’s been little proof that social networking sells wines -- although it certainly helps longer-term marketing efforts.
Pope, whose wine mini-empire also includes a popular wine bar and restaurant and a growing portfolio of his own wine brands, specializes in selling mostly high-end, hard-to-find (at least in the past) wines. He gets his toe in the door with a folksy catalog he admits was influenced by the famed J. Peterman catalogs parodied on Seinfeld, but sells primarily by phone once a relationship is established. This includes wine clubs as well as direct sales.
“Chatterbox Wine Marketing came about because I knew that forward-thinking wineries would seek to sell (more) wine consumer-direct, particularly in this economy,” Pope says. “And because we are the ‘best of set,’ we could be instrumental in helping them succeed,” he says, basing his claim on a Marketing Bank survey of Bounty Hunter's top 1,000 customers.
He also feels that the expertise developed during 16 years of direct-to-consumer sales at Bounty Hunter could be used to assist wineries with their direct-to-consumer businesses. “Mark’s operation attracted us due to their experience telemarketing high-end wines,” Tamburelli says.
Chatterbox’s “boxsters” (phone sales reps) are wine specialists who are trained with the company’s winery customers. “They trained with us,” Kapcsandy recalls. “They came out here and learned about our vineyard, our winery and our wines. They were completely immersed in our customs.”
When on the phone, the “boxsters” act as part of the winery. In effect, they provide an extension to the winery during a direct-to-consumer campaign.
Tamburelli says that Chappellet considered hiring its own telesales people, but realized that he and his staff didn’t have the experience to train them.
Pope says, “Contacting customers is not just picking up the phone. It takes training and specific expertise to ensure a positive customer experience. It is not necessarily the expertise or an automatic skill of winery hospitality staff. In fact, many winery staff resist or are unhappy about calling customers.”
He says he’s developed technology that provides a seamless interaction for direct-to-consumer customers.
Both Tamburelli and Kapcsandy had worked with the Bounty Hunter previously; it sold their wines from its retail portfolio.
And how do customers feel about calls from winery reps? “Our experience is that they are happy about the winery making the effort to reach out to them,” Pope claims.
Even in this era of “do not call lists,” telemarketing to customers who have “opted-in” provides an effective solution for wineries, maximizing their direct-to-consumer sales while still carefully protecting their brand integrity for the long term.
