I begin by saying I’m neither a vintner nor grape grower, etc. However, I am a premium wine collector. My palate may be a bit challenged, but our cellar makes up for that.

Next let me say in my prior career I was a major gift fundraiser for an international child development nonprofit. From a home office, I covered a 12-state region and carried a portfolio of just over 900 donors and prospects. I was also a remote, one-person field office. Chief cook and bottle washer. So I know a bit about how to manage a significant client list. I also had to raise between $2 and $3 million in donations every year.

Now I’m semi-retired and my focus tends towards collecting for our wine cellar and our new Lab puppy, appropriately named Napa.

Currently our cellar holds wines from 247 wineries. 82% of those are in the Napa Valley, and over 99% of our wines were purchased directly from the producers.

In my fundraising career I kept three rules sacrosanct when it came to my donors. One: “Every donor is important, but some are simply more valuable than others.” Two: “Communicate, communicate, communicate!” Three: “It’s far cheaper to retain a current donor than to have to find and cultivate a new, cold prospect.”

These days ‘big data’ is all the rage and I certainly understand its importance and place. However, my advice now as a collector and spender of money on wine, is for vintners to NOT overlook their small data – especially when it comes to their most valuable assets – those folks who are already resident on their customer list, who love, and best of all, buy, their wines!

I’m surprised by the number of wineries I’ve bought wine from, directly, who have never contacted me beyond my receipt or simply relegated me to their automated email queue, which means Gmail relegates their missives out of my main inbox. After all little says ‘we value your business’ more than the recent email I received from one vintner, which began “Dear [insert customer name].”

Now I’m in no way saying I’m in the top tier of wine buyers. No way at all, but I do buy more than my fair share of fine wines and buy a huge majority of them from small, boutique wineries. Most of all it should be exactly those wineries who are focused on their small data – their customer list!

I’m not a computer geek, but if even I was able to learn how to manipulate an Excel spreadsheet to slice and dice my list, I’m guessing vintners/wineries can do the same with their customer list to make sure their most valuable assets are being communicated with and solicited! It’s not hard to rearrange by largest to smallest, top 25, time of last check, those who have lapsed, etc. Nope, not all that hard and I certainly know it helped me not miss some important folks, timelines, requests, etc. and to make my goal every year.

Actually, this became my Friday night, quitting time, just before my glass of wine to start the weekend, ritual. I would pick one way to rearrange my list and then look at it in that format over the weekend to set my agenda for the coming week ahead.

As the poster in the hall outside the office of my old CEO stated “If nobody sells a terrible thing happens. Nothing!”

All I can add to that is “truth”!

Cheers to all!