How to Not Cry in Your Car: Wine Sales Rep Edition
This is a story I wrote a few years back while I was a wine sales representative for a mid-sized wine distributor here in New York City. I recently discovered it, gave it a quick polish, and decided to share it with you fine people. Cheers!
Today I spent 45 minutes out of my 60-minute drive home from another day on the job straight up ugly-crying in the driver’s seat of my dirt-and-pollen-covered garbage-filled old-wine-scented car. Okay, so maybe that didn’t really happen and it’s a total exaggeration, but it could honestly happen on any given day, especially in this job.
The life of a wine sales rep can be fun, crazy, rewarding, and above all, exciting. There’s a certain high you get when you close a sale that you’ve been working on for weeks, or when you get that new hip restaurant to feature your wines BTG (that’s ‘by the glass’ in wine speak), or when you get some perfectly-placed floor stacks of wines on your incentive program. There’s an even greater feeling of personal achievement you get when a buyer finally opens up to you and starts talking to you like a person instead of just another supplier trying to peddle some un-needed and un-asked for goods on them. But for all the positives, there are definitely some moments when you’re just starting out as a wine sales representative that make you wonder if it’s all worth it.
Here’s how to handle the trials and tribulations of wine sales rep-dom (aka how not to cry in your car during your first weeks on the job):
Suck it up, buttercup. There’s no sugar coating here. Yeah, sometimes you might get yelled or snarled at or just blatantly ignored for 30 minutes, and sometimes you might even get kicked out of a store (or two), and sometimes buyers might just be ‘testing’ you to see if you’ll fall to pieces and dissolve into a puddle of emotion or keep relentlessly showing up week after week with new wines that no one will taste anyway. But no matter what, you just have to keep at it and let all the shit that’s thrown at you roll right off your back and into the garbage where it belongs.
Bring good snacks with you. Comfort food does wonders when you’re sitting in your car, shoes soggy from trodding through muddy puddles, hair going in god knows how many directions because your damn raincoat hood won’t stay on and you can’t hold an umbrella and your rolling wine bag and your hood at the same time, and fingers that are beginning to take on the shakes because they’ve been exposed to the freezing rain all day and you forgot gloves at home and still need to drag around the aforementioned rolling wine bag. In this scenario, I’d personally prefer some nice warm mac and cheese with a crunchy breadcrumb crust popped straight out of the oven in a piping hot Le Creuset mini cocotte, but any flavor cake pop from Starbucks will suffice in a pinch too.
Keep your music playlist game going strong. The best way to zen-out and blow off some steam in your car is to crank the volume up and jam out. Whatever music style is your poison, just make sure it’s readily available, downloaded and/or at your Spotify-fingertips, especially when you find yourself in a dreaded internet dead zone while sitting in hours of traffic. (Note: jamming out too much and semi-recklessly driving because of it can potentially lead to another stress-inducing situation — getting pulled over by the cops; which may or may not have happened at least once during my time on the job thus far.)
Remember that it’s just wine. Although you really want to surpass that quarterly goal, and you really want to sell more cases this month than your territory did last year, and you really want to win a spot on that sweet incentive trip visiting wineries in Spain, and you really want to outsell your colleague (read: competition) who started at the company around the same time as you, sometimes you just need to take a step back, take a deep breath, and remember that it’s just wine you’re selling. (This is particularly important to remember when you have a buyer flipping their lid on you over vintage-variation in a $6 bottle of wine, or complaining that you haven’t spent more of your Saturday nights hosting in-store tastings for them and their 10 walk-in customers when you’ve done one a month for them for the last half a year, etc.)
Happy Selling!
