As the calendar turns to the often spirits-heavy holiday season, the National Beer Wholesalers Association (NBWA) highlighted its Beer First Initiative toolkit during its annual convention earlier this month, including selling materials to help better position beer against wine and spirits in the fourth quarter of the year.
The toolkit, which is available year-round, includes on- and off-premise profit calculators, nearly a dozen channel-specific sell sheets and how-to guides for all materials, plus one on hosting a Beer First Friday, the initiative’s on-premise promotion.
“We’ve got a lot of tools that have been developed by the Beer First committee, which has been a committee of distributors from around the country from chain markets, from independent markets, to help guide us in this journey over the past couple of years in developing the Beer First tools telling us really what they need in the market to activate beer as a category against wine and spirits,” Tamarron Consulting VP Mike McDonnell said during a conference breakout session about the toolkit.
The NBWA developed the Beer First Initiative in 2018 to defend beer’s existing share from the encroaching spirits category; it began offering sales materials in 2019. In the past two decades, beer’s share of beverage-alcohol consumption has declined from 59% to 46%, McDonnell said.
“We all know the common refrain that beer is getting its ass handed to us by especially spirits – wine has been pretty steady,” he said. “But the need for the call to action has been real. It’s been clear.”
For the fourth quarter of 2022, the initiative produced a sell sheet touting beer’s dominance over wine and spirits at retail during O-N-D (October, November, December) citing data from NielsenIQ and Beer Marketer’s Insights’ 2022 Beer Industry Update. Stats featured included that beer is the No. 1 bev-alc product at grocery stores during the period, capturing 43% of dollars, followed by wine (37%) and spirits (20%), which cannot be sold at grocery stores in some states.
Beer also outperforms the other categories in rate of sale per point of distribution (POD) at $8,810 per POD, compared to wine at $5,289 and spirits at $5,151. Shoppers who buy beer also repeat their purchases more often (69.5%) than wine shoppers (63.9%) or spirits shoppers (58%).
Other Beer First off-premise sell sheets also include data about rate of sale, trip frequency, basket ring, display lift and other metrics.
“That all helps support the beer category as the dominant category over wine and spirits,” McDonnell said. “The intention of using these sell sheets is not to spend an entire sales call on diving into the sell sheets, but really at the top of the sales call setting up the beer category versus wine and spirits before getting into your KPI or your pitch for the day.”
Channel-specific sell sheets, which can be downloaded from the initiative’s portal, include:
- Grocery,
- Liquor store,
- Convenience store,
- Mass retailer,
- Grocery stores that sell both wine and spirits during O-N-D,
- Grocery stores that sell wine during O-N-D,
- On-premise,
- Casual dining,
- Independent restaurant,
- And neighborhood bar.
Armed with sell sheets, profit calculators and a beer-first (rather than brand-first) mindset, distributor sales reps can set themselves and the category up for success, sales educator consultant Tom Fox said during the breakout session. Fox cited a tip from a recent podcast in which a sales expert shared that “the longer you wait to mention your brands and solutions, the better chance you have of closing the sale.”
Using Beer First tools “could take the call and send it off into a highly professional approach, a highly customer-focused approach, but then transcend that and lead that into our own branded solutions, programs, new items, whatever, into a similar way of quantifying impact, quantifying profit and revenue, which again are not that difficult to do,” he continued.
“Once you do it for Beer First, it will elevate the rest of that call,” Fox said.
In addition to sell sheets, the Beer First Initiative is championing Beer First Fridays, an on-premise promotion designed to celebrate beer with drinkers. Ohio-based Winking Lizard Tavern trialed the promotion to much success, owner John Lane said.
Lane discussed his experience hosting Beer First Fridays during the breakout session and during the convention’s general session, and shared tips for wholesalers looking to activate the program with their retail partners.
“The most important thing is we can’t just say beer,” Lane said. “We got one of our best partners, Great Lakes Brewery, along with one of our best wholesalers, Superior [Beverage Group] to come together.”
Winking Lizard staff, Great Lakes reps and Superior employees were briefed on the goal to promote the brewery’s Dortmunder and Oktoberfest. All customer interactions opened with the offering of those two beers, Lane said.
“It was amazing how much more in our busiest store we were able to sell just by mentioning those two beers off the bat,” he added.
Beer First Friday generated a +10% week-over-week lift in beer sales, Lane said.
The NBWA offers customizable point-of-sale materials to promote Beer First Friday events and the initiative’s hashtag, #BeersToThat and suggests drinker activations, such as photo booths with props and giveaways. The events are “all about celebrating beer, showing support for on-premise partners and blanketing social media with great beer moments,” according to the initiative’s how-to guide.
To master using the tools and data-driven selling method, sales employees can take the NBWA’s Beer First sales certification program, created with Tamarron, to become certified sales specialists or profit experts. The certification is modeled after the Wine and Spirits Education Trust’s (WSET) training and certification program, Tamarron co-founder and president Lori Scheiffler said during the breakout session.
Scheiffler cited a WSET survey that found sales certification made 88% of respondents feel more effective in their jobs, 90% felt more confident after earning certification, and 85% felt more “empowered” to sell a wider portfolio of products.
“When we looked at that, it really told us we need that certification for beer,” she said. “We need to have something that will help drive our category.”