What are considered best practices in this community for tracking referrals from third parties, namely, other winery, concierge, tour operators, etc. We have been entering the info in Notes currently but not consistently capturing the info. Is there a spot on the POS that works best for everyone as well?
Thank you.
It really depends on your scope. If you want to manually input something each time, like in a custom note, that affords you the most flexibility, but it makes running reports against it more tedious.
Having tried a number of strategies, I find narrowing your scope to only a handful of referral entities to be the best approach. These are the partners that are already referring people to you or the partners you’re targeting via outreach or industry parties.
If you decide to go that route, using the Sales Attribute option is your best bet. You have to specify which referral partners you want to track and then your team will have the opportunity to add them to the transaction in the POS pretty easily. This approach does not scale well, though, so you’ll probably want to pick about 25 max. Alternately, you can create dummy product items, which can be searched.
Ultimately with tracking anything, you have to consider what you intend to do with the information. I’ve seen a number of wineries track referrals just to track referrals and then do nothing with it. Your strategy will dictate your approach.
Thanks Ed. We are creating a program that tracks and rewards not only the referral location but my staff member who is responsible for that relationship. All staff members are assigned 6-10 referral partners and I pay them 2 hours a week to visit with each partner at least once a month. The goal is building solid relationships, not just drop off a bottle of wine and hope they send us someone.
You’re doing it right! Sounds like Sales Attribute would work best for you. I would set your POS to Forced Additional Order Info if you’re not already doing so, that will prompt them to add a referral at the end of each purchase if necessary.
