Has anyone ever visited your site for the very first time, and immediately asked for a detailed sales proposal? No?

In the same way as whisky takes time to build up its flavour profile, as well as time to reveal it to you as a drinker, warm leads emerge from your pool of contacts a little bit at a time. This means that properly effective marketing cannot be obsessed only with immediate conversions, but must also pay attention to the slow-burners.

For example, at Spotler we used to flag anyone who attended a webinar as an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead). However, a look at the wider picture showed this was premature. Hurrying them into the hands of our Sales team at this point was leading to too many lost opportunities. Since we started treating webinar attendance as an “earlier in the funnel” activity, we’ve seen much better results. Not only are we not chasing away leads who would be interested later on, but we are also giving the salespeople more space to work on the genuine MQLs.

Another strand of this is our podcast, which you can find here. By talking about broad marketing topics, and deliberately excluding a sales pitch, we draw potential leads into our orbit and establish ourselves as a good sauce of information. This creates what psychologists call “mental availability”; the Spotler brand is established in the mind of our leads before they enter an active buying state. Then once they are looking for a marketing automation platform, Spotler should be at the top of their minds.

Over to Laithwaites’ Tim Collis for some thoughts on the average sherry drinker…..

Picture the scene – you break the seal off a whisk(e)y you’ve been told is the very best, you close your eyes, take a sniff then a sip, enjoy that explosion of flavours but you may ponder ‘is this as good as it gets?’

With Whisk(e)y now being made in over 25 countries (and there’s so much in Scotland that it’s broken down into 6 world-famous regions) then you can spend a lifetime trying to find your ‘favourite’!

But firstly – what’s with the Whisky v. Whisk(e)y spelling? Not surprisingly there are more opinions on this than bottles on a bottling line – one of the popular theories is that Ireland and Scotland were the first two countries to produce this drink and they each spelt it differently to promote their national brand, yup, sounds plausible.  But broadly speaking, putting the spelling to one side, it’s all made the same way…

A fermented grain mixture is heated and as alcohol has a lower boiling point than water then the alcohol vapours rise; sometimes the distiller might repeat the process, but that’s about it ….. end of.

The distilled liquid is clear and all those gorgeous colours and flavours are produced by gentle ageing in the barrel (except for the smoky flavours normally produced by burning peat to dry the grain). Sometimes they’ll use new barrels, sometimes they’ll use barrels that have been used for something else (maybe sherry, rioja or port).

If you want to increase your knowledge then it’s probably sensible to join a whisk(e)y tasting which includes a bit of all the above (barley v. grain, peated v. unpeated, single whisk(e)y v. blend, new wood v. 2nd fill) …it’s going to be a tough session, but you’ve got to start somewhere!

One to put on your list is an English beauty from the Cotswolds – it’s a single malt whisky with wonderful deep flavours of honey, Seville orange marmalade and dark red fruits. It is matured in ex-red wine casks and 2nd fill bourbon barrels. They also do a wonderful tasting that covers everything – now there’s an idea for a Spotler customer event, mention it to your account manager ?!?. If you fancy trying a bottle of COTSWOLDS SIGNATURE SINGLE MALT WHISKY then it’ll be £ 48.40 delivered to a UK address, saving £ 4.50*. Simply send ‘SNIFTER’ to  Tim Collis at Laithwaites Surbiton to take up the offer.

* The standard price including UK delivery is £52.90. Standard terms & conditions apply and are available on request

Thanks to Tim for his opinions.