The more you dive into why military outfits train and drill relentlessly, the more parallels you will see in building a high-performance sales team in the wine & spirits industry.
As someone who’s lead sales teams for over 30 years in my corporate life, I am intimately familiar with what it takes to put a well-trained sales team on the “battlefield.”
“Battlefield” is an apt description of the current environment, given the ebbing tide of consumption.
If you feel I’m being melodramatic here, more excellent people than I have proffered this analogy. Business success requires intense strategic planning, shrewdness in gaining dominancy over rivals, a need for deep analysis, and innovative tactics, just like in war.
In 2025 (and well beyond), today’s sales teams must strictly adhere to three crucial ideals: discipline, precision, and a mission-oriented mindset.
It will come as a surprise to no one that DISCIPLINE is the backbone of military success. Structure and consistency bring predictable success to military units and sales teams alike.
Discipline has negative connotations in a modern society that craves freedom and independent thought. The irony is that freedom is the primary byproduct of discipline. Aristotle said, “Through discipline comes freedom.”
It’s hard to wrap one’s head around the idea of military discipline while peddling such a hedonistic array of delicious elixirs. The romance and artistry of our product category seem ridiculously juxtaposed with the ‘ten-hut” command-and-control world of armed forces. But the analogy is achingly apropos.
Relaxing and going with the flow is more manageable in times of boom and plenty. But when all the chips are on the table and the stakes are high, brands need every advantage they can muster, which is the spirit of this article.
“At my signal, unleash hell” is a line from the movie Gladiator. In The Godfather II (or simply “II” for Sopranos fans), Michael Corleone lamented his lack of a wartime consigliere.
War is serious business with an emphasis on “business.” Anyone who’s worked for a publicly traded wine or spirits company knows full well the do-or-die nature of the mission at hand.
Before 2025 comes to a close, there will be casualties, you can be sure. So, if you want to be on the winning side, you’d be well served to pay heed to the following eight non-negotiables.
Predictable results are what you should be after. The once-thin margin for error has gone AWOL.
So far this year, I’ve had several meetings with multiple winery and distillery owners to help them review their battle plan for 2025, and the tone/mood was cold and sober.
The words they brought up most often in these discussions include “structure,” “efficiency,” “focus,” and “execution.” Among the contributions from my sales-efficiency expert lexicon are “discipline,” “precision,” and “accountability.”
Winning sales teams adopt a disciplined approach because it leads to victory. Consistency, structure, and predictability are the hallmarks of winning teams.
Sharp adherence to discipline facilitates focus, efficient use of time and resources, and minimizes distractions.
Discipline helps reduce waste and maximize productivity, leading to more closed deals and higher conversion rates.
Adherence to discipline frees salespeople from making mistakes that can sabotage productivity.
Since time ⏱️ is the most precious resource of every salesperson, providing a clear line of sight into ALL sales activity, communication, and follow-up tasks is essential to efficiency because it significantly reduces the need for meetings, emails, and phone calls.
Clear communication is essential in high-stakes military situations. Systems that provide speed and clarity eliminate errors, missed opportunities, and SNAFUs.
There is no better way to facilitate this than with a cloud-based, mobile-friendly CRM system.
Here is a practical example of how clear communication among sales team members facilitates sales effectiveness:
In the pre-CRM era, if a sales leader wanted to know how things were progressing with a significant chain opportunity, they would either pick up the phone or email the national account manager to inquire about the opportunity's status. This is a highly inefficient use of BOTH people’s time. With a disciplined use of CRM, all that is needed is to log into the CRM system, go to the Pipeline board (typically in a Kanban view), and see where the Deal sits in the pipeline, including all previous interactions with key decision makers and the next steps to close. ,
This is just one example of how facilitating clear communications is essential to sales team efficiency.
No one with an IQ above room temperature would argue that success in military operations depends upon a strong sense of mission—a singular focus on the desired outcome. This is “discipline in action.”
This sense of mission requires strict adherence to direct orders, training, drills, and accountability.
Unfortunately, most sales teams in the wine & spirits industry lack this level of disciplined focus on the mission, but this need not be the case.
It starts with strict hiring protocols to ensure that only the most organized, disciplined sales pros join the team.
Then, the “training and drilling” process begins BEFORE a new salesperson is released on the streets.
For many companies, no such training exists. Instead, they rely on relationships with key trade buyers and relationships with key distributor leaders to carry the day. This used to work, but it is no longer enough.
In today’s competitive and challenging environment, there will be a great separation between companies that understand how to create, foster, and execute a sense of mission and those who don’t.
Ah, yes, “trust.” Many view this term as merely a euphemism for a Big Brother mentality. Ironically, requiring sales team members to record all communications, activity, and follow-up tasks in a CRM system builds trust, not undermines it.
“Why do I have to record everything in CRM? Don’t you trust me?” is a common refrain. If you suffer from this toxic malady when it comes to fostering adoption of CRM among your sales team, here are two essential perspectives to cultivate:
For a sales team, cohesion means how sales team members work together toward shared goals.
Working effectively towards shared goals is as essential to sales success as military success.
Sales teams perform best within a positive work environment. The sales team leader is responsible for cultivating cohesion. Like a professional sports team coach, the sales leader must possess the skills necessary to lead sales teams.
In Stephen M. R. Covey’s book The Speed of Trust ( a must-read for every sales leader), the author posits that trust is the primary driver of success. Building trust leads to faster decision-making, increased productivity, and high levels of performance.
However, many sales leaders demoralize and demean their salespeople through micromanagement and control. These poor, insecure souls have a twisted and misguided view of what outstanding leadership truly is.
If you’re a business owner, you should never allow this kind of leader onto your payroll. And if you have one now, it’s time to move them out. If you can’t change your people, change your people.
When it comes to success in sales, details matter. Not a little. A lot.
No sales team can consistently crush its goals without meticulous attention to detail.
After more than 30 years of leading high-performance sales teams, I can tell you with great confidence that there are two kinds of salespeople: over detailers and under detailers. The latter are incredibly easy to spot.
Having read thousands of weekly call reports, it is painfully evident why some sales teams consistently fail to meet their sales targets: poor attention to detail.
Here’s what it looks like:
This shoot-now-ask questions-later is the trademark of sloppy, undisciplined salespeople. You can’t train an underdetailer to be better at this; you must hire overdetailers.
Like physicians diagnosing patients, sales leaders must be adept at spotting a lack of attention to detail among sales team members.
Show me a sales team that consistently achieves its sales targets and I’ll show you one disciplined band of brothers and sisters.
Our industry's (especially in the wine category) use of the term “sales training” for product knowledge training is a travesty of the highest order.
Of course, product knowledge is essential. But business acumen eats product knowledge for breakfast.
Failure to adequately train your sales team to be a highly efficient and effective machine is an enormous oversight in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace.
Modern sales training should provide a balanced approach to training. For every hour spent on product knowledge training, you should spend three hours on “real” sales training.
Military success requires constant “drills” to not only instill discipline but to improve teamwork and collaboration.
In much the same way, sales success is in direct proportion to the level of training provided. But what to train and how to train are just as important.
Some of the most important components of sales training for wine and spirits sales are:
To achieve high levels of sales success, wine and spirits companies must move beyond an intuitive, “just do it” approach to a more disciplined and structured approach. This requires training!
In Ram Charan’s book, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, having a small number of clear priorities is key to great execution.
Said another way, the key to accelerating sales is to keep your focus narrow. This takes precise planning and rigorous standards.
Execution requires systems and processes. And lots of practice!
Even the best strategic sales plan is useless without the ability to execute it.
A great example of this is the classic sales pipeline that recognizes sales success is a “journey” each customer takes on the way to closing the sale. Failure to respect this customer journey will result in lots of sales calls and presentations but very few sales.
The typical stages in a classic sales pipeline are:
The very best way to execute a sales pipeline is to leverage a CRM system that provides visibility to everyone on where each key account or chain is in the pipeline.
Nothing falls through the cracks. No balls get dropped. Major chains and key accounts take priority over “more sales calls to more accounts.”
Just as it is in military success, wine and spirits sales success requires precise execution. Winging it just won’t get it done.
As humans, we tend to resist accountability in all forms. And while that might be OK for some things, it’s a recipe for failure when it comes to sales success.
It is a fact that left to their own devices, most salespeople do not always act in their own best interests, let alone the company’s best interests.
Most salespeople (and sales leaders) operate using a results-by-volume approach: more sales calls to more accounts. But this is flawed paradigm because not all accounts are equally capable of helping you deliver on your sales objectives.
Volume is a critical objective in wine sales because the raw materials required to produce the inventory (grapes), cannot be adjusted up or down as easily as they can for beer and spirts. Grape contracts and acreage under vine are quite inflexible.
Therefore, achieving the annual volume goals is mission critical. Without a strategic focus on the accounts that are capable of buying large volumes of wine, the enterprise is in danger of having back-to-back vintages stacking up in their warehouse.
All of this requires accountability for achieving volume goals.
Accountability isn’t a bad thing. In fact, its strategic business imperative.
Holding salespeople accountable for results is job #1 for the sales leader(s). However, most in our industry have never been properly trained on implementing a framework for holding salespeople accountable. And here is the framework:
Step One: Hire the right people
Step Two: Provide the proper training
Step Three: Set goals and establish KPIs
Step Four: Establish key account targets for each territory
Step Five: Track all sales activity in a CRM system
Step Six: Conduct brief, weekly sales huddles
On top of this system, there are some key principles to adhere to that include:
Lastly, if you’ve made a hiring mistake, you must take steps to remedy the situation as quickly and respectfully as possible. Bad hires happen to even the best sales leaders. But knowing how to navigate this well is a “gift” to the rest of the sales team because you owe it to them to only have top performers on the team.
It goes without saying that accountability starts with having the right sales leadership in place. They need training too!
In the military, accountability is all about systems that ensure each individual is responsible for their actions as well as the resources they’ve been given.
In wine and spirits sales, those “resources” include disciplined use of their time. This requires discipline, prioritization, and training.
Success in the wine and spirits industry today is not for the undisciplined, the untrained, or the unaccountable. Just as elite military units rely on structure, focus, and flawless execution to complete their missions, so too must modern sales teams operate with rigor and resolve. In a world where margins are shrinking and competition is fierce, discipline isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s the edge that separates the winners from the fallen. Choose to lead with intention, train like it matters, and execute with precision. That’s how battles are won—and sales goals are crushed.
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