Notes from rooms we have briefed
These notes come from commercial leads who sat with a pack we drew. They mention the work, not a score.
We knew HORECA was expensive to serve. The pack named the six Tbilisi restaurants still on ‘temporary’ terms from 2023. I used that page in the owners’ meeting the same week. The rest of the pack was quieter than I wanted, which was also useful — the grocery channel was not the villain I had been briefed to blame.
The first draft asked for a cleaner SKU list than we keep, so we lost a week tidying the export. After that the pack was the one our area managers actually opened. I still think the territory page is harsher on Kakheti than the van schedules can bear, but at least the argument is now about the page, not about whose memory of last summer is right.
Monthly sittings keep me from rebuilding the same three charts every close. When a supplier shortage hit two SKUs, the exception list showed the gap as a hole in the month, not as a failure of the stores.
They refused to split Batumi from the rest of Adjara until we stopped using one customer code for both. Annoying. Correct.
The wine importer, at length
The company imports bottled wine and sells through grocery, HORECA, and a few named hotels. The commercial director came to us after a year in which the total looked acceptable and the cash did not. The extract was twelve months of invoice lines from the accounting ledger, with a channel mark that had been maintained reasonably well.
The grocery pages were dull in the best sense: volume held, discounting was inside the policy. The HORECA pages were not. A small set of Tbilisi restaurants had been granted terms during a slow spring and never returned to list. Because the discount sat in a header field rather than on the line, the sales office had not seen it in their usual pivot. We put those accounts on the exception list with the original grant date.
The briefing lasted the full ninety minutes because the owners joined. We did not propose a new channel strategy. We walked the pages and left the commercial director with a list she could take to each account. The revised pack added a single page showing what the year would have looked like at list terms. That page is the one they still keep.