Campaign week, as it really happens
The first releases land and you send your offer: forty or fifty wines, prices per case of six or twelve, in bond, with a short note on each. Within an hour the replies start. One customer writes 'the usual please, plus two of the Pauillac'. Another rings the shop and leaves a message with whoever picked up. A third replies to last year's offer email by mistake. Your best customer sends a text to the manager's personal phone.
All of it ends up in a spreadsheet with a tab per wine, maintained by one person who is also answering the phone. By the second week there are three versions of that spreadsheet, a pile of sticky notes by the till and a nagging worry that somebody's request never made it in.
Then the chateau releases the next tranche at a higher price and you need to know, quickly, who asked for what before the price moved.
The real problem is that a request has no home
It is tempting to blame the volume. The volume is not the issue; campaigns have always been busy. The issue is that a request exists in whatever channel it arrived in, and the spreadsheet is a copy made later by hand. Nothing links the two. If the copy is wrong or missing, nobody can tell until the customer asks.
- Replies quote the offer loosely: 'the second Margaux', 'the one you liked'.
- Requests often mention quantities in bottles when the wine is sold by the case.
- Customers change their mind by replying to a different email thread.
- Staff taking phone orders write them down in different formats.
- Nobody records the time a request arrived, which matters when a wine is short.
When requests have no timestamp and no link to the exact offer line, fairness and accuracy both depend on memory.
What a messy campaign costs you
A missed request is the obvious risk: a loyal customer finds out their order was never placed, and they remember it. Less visible is the staff time. Someone rereads every thread to check the spreadsheet before invoices go out, and someone else chases customers who wrote 'a few bottles' to ask how many they meant. Invoices go out late, so payment arrives late, and your own commitments to the merchants you buy from do not wait.
There is also the quiet cost of not knowing your demand while the campaign is live. Without a clean total per wine, deciding how much to ask your supplier for becomes a guess.
The campaign order system we build
- Each offer is loaded as a set of lines: wine, vintage, format, case size, price and whether it is in bond or duty paid.
- Replies to the offer mailbox are read by an extraction step that proposes which lines the customer means and the quantity in cases, using the offer text for context. Staff confirm or correct each proposal in one screen.
- Phone and in-shop requests go into a short form on a tablet or the shop computer, against the same offer lines, so they look identical to emailed ones.
- Every request gets a timestamp, the customer record it belongs to and a status: received, confirmed, allocated, invoiced, paid.
- Changes and cancellations are recorded as new entries on the request, so you can always see what the customer asked for first.
- Totals per wine update as requests arrive, so you can see demand against what you expect to be offered.
- Invoices and confirmation emails are produced from the confirmed requests and sent through your accounts package, such as Xero, rather than retyped.
| What arrives | What the system does | Who looks at it |
|---|---|---|
| Clear email reply | Matched to offer lines, waiting for a click to confirm | Office staff, briefly |
| Vague reply ('a few of the Pomerol') | Flagged with a suggested question to send back | Office staff |
| Phone order | Entered on the short form against the offer | Whoever took the call |
| Change of mind | Added as an amendment, original kept | Office staff |
| Request for a wine not on the offer | Held as a wish for the buyer to review | Buyer |
The extraction step only suggests. A person confirms each request before it counts, because a misread quantity on a case of first growth is not a small mistake.
A calmer second week
When the busy days come, everyone works from one list. The manager can see at a glance which customers have asked for which wines, in what order, and what is still unconfirmed. Customers get a confirmation that restates their order in plain words, so misunderstandings surface early rather than at invoice time.
When the next tranche arrives, you already know who is waiting, and the invoices go out from records you trust.
Signs this is your campaign
- Your en primeur record is a spreadsheet with a tab per wine.
- Orders arrive by email, phone, text and in person, and all are retyped.
- You have discovered a missed request only when the customer chased it.
- Checking the spreadsheet against the inbox takes a full day before invoicing.
- You cannot say who asked first for a wine that turns out to be short.