Self Distribute Your Beer With Ease

Distributing beer yourself is a hands-on and involved process. Everything from building strong relationships with customers, to planning delivery routes and making sure you get paid on time falls on your shoulders. There is a lot to think about.

Whether you’re just getting started in your distribution journey, or a seasoned brewery sales person looking for ways to improve your process, this article will give you what you need. Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Customer relationship management
• Delivery planning 
• Getting paid on time

Let’s dive in!

Strong relationships are the foundation of an effective self distribution model, and personalizing your offers to different customers’ needs can help you stand out from the competition in a crowded market. 

This could mean reaching out just when a customer was about to reach out to you, paying special attention to their purchasing preferences, or getting to know your customers on a more personal level.

Keeping track of information about your customers and how they interact with your business can help you tailor your outreach to them. Below are a few ideas on things you can keep track of to get you started.

Purchasing trends

Customer outreach isn’t one size fits all. Different customers are able to get through your products at different rates, some businesses may only order seasonally, and others might struggle to keep your beer on their shelves or taps. 

Paying attention to how often each customer purchases from you can help you to reach out at just the right moment. For a customer that typically orders once a month, reaching out every two weeks may get annoying, but if you don’t reach out for two months, your customer might forget about you and you could miss out on sales. Tracking how often each customer orders can help you get in touch at just the right moment. 

Help your customers through their buying decisions wherever you can to remove friction and make buying from you seamless.

Personal Reminders

To take it one step further you could try to keep track of how a customer’s purchasing patterns change throughout the year so that you can anticipate their needs and recommend different volumes of different products based on what you know about their business.

Perhaps you have a customer who usually stocks up on a particular product for an annual event. Reaching out when this event is coming up shows customers that you’re paying attention to their business and adds a personal touch. 

This could be a great opportunity to strengthen your relationship with the customer too. Maybe you could offer a large amount of stock at a discounted price just in time for their big event. These savings will be valuable for them, you get a chunk of your product out there for their special event, and you build goodwill with your customer. It’s a win all round.

When you’re distributing your product yourself, the actual deliveries fall to you. Every keg and can has to be dropped off, and invoiced by someone on your team. Plus, you have to make sure you’re picking up every empty keg along the way, and managing your keg deposits. 

All of this can be time consuming to say the least. But there are a few small things you can do to simplify things.

Route planning

Depending on the number of customers you are selling to, it might be worth grouping customers together for regular deliveries on particular days. This could save you a ton of time, gas and frustration bouncing all over the city every day. 

Once you have your deliveries grouped you could take it a step further and organize them by address. You could do this manually via google maps, but it would be a lot quicker using a route planning tool. You can even find some route planning tools that offer these services for free for customer lists under a certain size. As of the date that this article was written, Routific offers free routing for up to 100 orders. 

Once you’ve got your route all mapped out, it's time to load up your truck. Try to create a picking list to make this a little easier. For anyone who isn’t using brewery management software, this could be achieved with some clever excel formatting. If you’re using a brewery management software, you likely have access to a picking list with the click of a button or two.

Keg tracking

Keg tracking is an important part of any brewery distribution workflow. Not every brewery will need to assign serial numbers to each keg, but keeping track of how many kegs you have out at each customer’s location is a good idea. 

According to Brewers Association, most breweries spend between $ 0.46 and $ 1.37 per barrel produced on keg loss costs each year. That amounts to thousands of dollars walking out the door annually.

Charging keg deposits can be a good way to keep customers accountable for returning your kegs/having them available for pickup. It can also soften the blow of needing to replace lost kegs at the end of each year. Many breweries handle this via a service item through their invoicing system, but your brewery management software may include dedicated deposit tracking. 

You will also need a way to communicate internally on how many kegs were dropped off and picked up. This usually falls to the delivery team to track, whether that’s via a note scribbled on their copy of the delivery slip, an email back to the salesperson, or a direct entry into your chosen brewery management software. We have a whole article on different options for tracking kegs and their deposits, you can check it out here.

There is a lot to consider when building out a self distribution plan. Try to map out a loose workflow before you start, but be flexible with this and willing to figure it out as you go. Make sure to document and update SOPs along the way, it makes things easier for everyone. 

Interested in learning how Brew Ninja can help you manage deliveries with ease? Check out our 5 minute demo video, or get in touch with the team.