The Venue Farming Framework: A Straightforward System to Sustain Demand by Grouping Customers into 4 Types (2 Winners ✅ + 2 Losers ❌)
Why a Regular Venue That Sells Your Brand Beats a Cool One That Doesn’t
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Dear Bottom-up Drinks Builder,
Today's issue follows up on a previous one in which I discussed the importance of using outlet segmentation to hunt new customers. Today, I'll dive deep into using such segmentation to farm existing clients. Lately, I’ve updated my terminology,y and I interchangeably refer to:
Hunting = Converting Demand
Farming =Sustaining Demand
Here you can read my previous articles about hunting aka converting demand:
Unfortunately, many brands I see daily lack a straightforward system to prioritize where to focus their effort on existing customers. They go in all directions, being pulled left and right by sales and marketing teams without a clear action plan.
They have a segmentation on a PowerPoint deck but don't implement it.
Image-based segmentations are useful for hunting new customers (driving distribution aka converting demand).
Volume-based segmentations are better for farming (developing rate of sale of velocity aka sustaining demand).
All companies have strategy decks. What brands miss are execution decks, which are action plans that give directions to the team and help them live by them.
“Let him, who’s without sin, cast the first stone”. I’m the first one to plead guilty.
I've always been against prioritizing outlets based on volume. I used to be a purist of premium brand building, and image played the main role until I became a Country Manager and started managing a P&L. That was the moment of truth almost a decade ago.
All my old talks about brand buildings still felt great, but I started seeing things differently. I needed to fund the journey, as I was working with tiny budgets (yes, this is a misconception; not always big brands have big budgets).
I started thinking: What's the point of being listed in a fancy venue if there are hardly any sales there? People may see it, but nobody will order it if it is unrelated to the occasion. There is no point in trying to harvest those outlets.
I'd rather spend time at a more average bar selling a lot than a cool bar that doesn't.
If they don't try to "get your bottle out there," they will not be interested. For this reason, I decided to add another dimension to segmentation.
It's not about cool or regular outlets. It's about who's putting an effort to sell it out.
This thinking led me to prioritize outlets in a way that was friendly to my resources and P&L. A simple way to understand which ones to focus on is to create a simple matrix like the one below.