Selling Beer The Better Way, With BrewBroker

The BrewBroker vision is to make the beer industry more sustainable, by doing better beer business. What we mean by this is removing all the inefficiencies within the industry from brewhouse production to beer consumption.

Over the past 14 months we have been asking our 700 plus users what their biggest challenges are. Almost unanimously the feedback has been selling more beer to increase revenue or changing the sales mix to generate a better margin.

The traditional solution to this business challenge is to hire more sales resource therefore increasing your overhead. One of my first jobs was working as sales rep for Bacardi and the methodology has changed little in the 15 years since I was pounding the streets of London.

There are a few issues with this approach:

• Recruitment — Finding the right person is tough, those with a black book are expensive, those with the potential can take months to find their feet and potentially years before they generate ROI
• Outlet Targeting — What type of sales do you want ? Direct delivery, through a wholesaler, independent free-trade, small groups, national accounts or maybe street food markets and outside events. There are barriers to entry for each of these, but you don’t know that when you start, you can spend a lot of time knocking on the wrong, or closed doors.
• Time Wasting — You spend a lot of time talking to bartenders, which in itself is a pleasurable experience however does not get you the sales you need. There is little clarity on the stocking policies and best way to engage buyers and at what level.
• Competition — With each one of the 3000 UK breweries chasing the same opportunities there are lots of people out there doing the same thing, so having a point of difference is less relevant than actually being able to get a meeting and hold a buyers attention.

In conclusion this method of scaling is expensive, risky and becoming less effective over time as the market becomes more saturated. There must be something BrewBroker can do to solve this huge industry inefficiency.

From the suppliers side we know the challenges and have a desire to solve this, however we wanted to better understand the perspective of the beer buyer.

A brewer told me an anecdote from the buyer at the Euston Tap, according to this brewer the buyer had 28 reps visit him ‘on the off chance’ in one afternoon. Obviously both sides of the equation could be missing out here there could have been a gem in that 28, the perfect next beer on the next rotation however it is impossible to give everyone that drops by the time they need to sell their product.

We had a lot of anecdotal information and instinctively know that there are issue from the buyers side too however in order to validate this we enlisted the help of our friends at KAMedia to conduct a survey of beer buyers.

We wanted to prove the below hypothesis’/questions:

• Having a diverse beer list was now prerequisite rather than a choice
• The buying process takes up a lot of time
• The buying process is enjoyable and necessary to build relationships
• The landscape is becoming more fragmented so some brands / opportunities could get missed

And ask:

• Where do buyers go to get their beer inspiration?

In total 50 buyers answered our research questionnaire, see below a snapshot of the findings:

With over a third of retailer stocking more than 50 different beer brands and rotating their selection 3 times per month on average, it’s clear that there is an increased customer demand for a wide range of beers and a frequently updated and fresh range of beers too. Retailers would agree, with over 9 in 10 saying that having an interesting craft beer range is important to them.

This is followed through in who they choose to stock their range from, with ‘having a wide range’ being the most important factor when choosing the breweries and wholesales that they purchase their beers from.

This for me was not surprising, consumer demand is what is fuelling the whole industry, however what was more surprising was how much time buyers spent meeting brewers and wholesalers to refine that beer list.

With all the tasks and responsibilities, a business owner has, it’s somewhat surprising that they spend, on average, 17% of their personal time in the business sourcing beers.

Furthermore, 1 in every 8 business spend more than 2 days per week sourcing beer for their business. Add to this that, on average, 2.8 members of the business are involved with sourcing beer, it’s not a surprise to see that 1 in 4 retailers believe that sourcing beer is labour intensive. This can also be damaging to the end consumer as 1 in 4 retailers also believe that they would stock a wider range if sourcing was an easier task.

There is a large and fragmented route to market for retailers, with 42% of them sourcing from more than 11 different brewers and 11% of them sourcing from 6 different wholesalers each and every month. They are also spending a lot of time researching these multitude of suppliers, with more than half of them visiting trade events, searching online, speaking to reps, speaking to other operators AND reading trade press — all on top of their day-to-day jobs. It’s ultimately leading to confusion, with 1 in 3 agreeing that trying to compare price, promotions etc. across a variety of different wholesalers and brewers is time consuming and complicated.

As we suspected there are challenges from both buyers and brewers.

What if there was a network that collected all of the opportunities available for brewers, qualified the lead and requirements for the buyer and then intuitively matched supply and demand based on core business objectives of both the buyer and the supplier ?

Well that is what we are doing at BrewBroker.

At BrewLDN this year we will be launching a service called ‘Deal-Flow’, you will get access to this via number of subscription tiers also launched at BrewLDN.

If you’re a brewery, sign up to BrewBroker here.

If you’re a buyer and would like to list an opportunity, you can do so here.