Au Revoire '07

Make the BookCliff tasting room your first stop celebrating New Year's Eve. We will be starting the party at 4:30 in the tasting room (which is still at 1468 Pearl St., just south of the mall on 15th St.). Come enjoy live music, $4.00 glasses of select BookCliff Vineyards wine, and free appetizers (while they last!). You can also warm up with our seasonal Mulled Wine. For those that don't know it's red wine warmed with spices (cinnamon, cloves, etc.) and sugar. It's a great winter treat on these cold December days and nights. Can't wait to see you!

Special Label Premier Party!

Scrambles' First Fine Wine Label to Premier This
Week...
BookCliff Vineyards and Scramble Campbell are proud to
present an exclusive signed and numbered, limited
edition of BookCliffs' 2003 Ensemble, a 100% Colorado
grown and produced, Bordeaux style blend of Merlot and
Cabernet Sauvignon.
This special label features one of many paintings
Scramble has created at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado. Check out some of Scramble's work at www.scramblecampbell.com.  100 bottles will be signed by the artist, so get yours soon!

Two Chances To Taste and Celebrate With Us

Thursday December 6th, 2007
Where: BookCliff Vineyards Tasting Room and
When: 5pm - 7pm Belvedere Belgian Chocolate Shop. Located on 15th and Pearl
Street. Just around the Corner from
the end of the Pearl Street Mall on 15th.
$5.00 glasses of Ensemble

Saturday December 8th, 2007
Good Thoughts Printing Studio located
on "The Hill" under Half Fast Subs (1209 13th St). During the wine tasting, Good Thoughts is hosting an art exhibit for Scramble Campbell and Conscious Alliance from Saturday Dec 8th to December 24th. The opening reception is on the 8th from 2 pm-9 p.m. Come taste this delightful Ensemble and reserve your signed and numbered bottle. Good Thoughts will also have Conscious Alliance art from past shows and lots of unique gifts to help complete your holiday shopping.

See you there!

Effective Referral Gifts (Part 3 of 3)

"Drink wine, and you will sleep well. Sleep, and you will not sin. Avoid sin, and you will be saved. Ergo, drink wine and be saved." ~ Medieval German saying

Jack Bergstrom writing here. This is the last of my mini 3 part series on Effective Referral Gifts. This article was written for my friends here at BookCliff Vineyards. They produce great award winning wines and whether you use their wine as a referral gift or drink it yourself, you will be making a great choice!

I thought it might be fun to do a little bit of time traveling together. I am going to set the "WayBack" machine for May 1989. Hold on to you hats!

I had just quit my well paid and extremely stressful and miserable job as a retail mega-store manager. I had left this steady paycheck with great benefits to fulfill one of my dreams...to own a company and control my own destiny. To do this, I had started an executive search firm and a temporary employment firm. The hows and whys of this particular choice would be many hours of fun to review, but would be well off target for our conversation today.

I rapidly discovered that my number one mission in my new company was to generate new business. In fact, it soon became obvious that if I did not figure out how to generate new business, in a consistent way and at significant levels, that I would be forced to close my company and go back to work for someone else. This was not acceptable and I vowed to learn whatever I had to learn in order to make my company a success.

One of the areas of business growth techniques that I mastered was the use of referral gifts and it made a huge difference. When someone referred my company, we were grateful! When someone gave my company a testimonial letter, a topic worthy of much review in its own right, we were very grateful! Our gratitude took many forms depending upon our finances and how much business was generated by the referral. As rough guidelines:

• If someone referred us, without even worrying about if the referred company used us or not, we sent out thank you notes immediately. We rewarded these referrals immediately with genuine gratitude.
• If someone referred us, and it generated business, we also took them to lunch or dinner.
• If someone wrote us a testimonial letter, we sent notes, fed them and did whatever else we could within reason and within the laws of the IRS to reward them. (Testimonials are a great tool in their own right and can themselves be transformational for your company!)

Additionally, as my business grew, we became very savvy about the likes and desires of our important contacts at each client company. For those that liked wine, we could reward them with great bottles of wine selected just for them. In those days I wasn't smart enough to do custom labeled wine, as you can get here from BookCliff Vineyards, but I certainly would now! For those that liked food, we sent them great food or were forced to go out on great dining experiences with them! So how did all of this work? Extremely well!

For simplicity, let's just look at the holiday season. My first Christmas season owning this company we passed out a few cases of wine, perhaps a dozen more expensive gift baskets and 50 or so decorative tins of Scandinavian cookies. The second Christmas we passed out perhaps a dozen cases of wine, perhaps 50 of the more expensive gift baskets and close to 200 decorative tins of cookies. By my 4th and final Christmas before I sold this company, we literally had pallets of gifts delivered to us. It would then take my salespeople and myself 2 full weeks just to deliver these gifts personally and say "Thanks for the business" and "Thanks for the referrals". This was the most rewarding time, personally and from a generated business standpoint, that we would ever spend in the entire year.

What is the lesson from this long story? Referral gifts work. Properly thought out and implemented, they work staggeringly well. Now you still need a really great product or service! If people refer you and you do a lousy job, nothing will save you. There are of course many other areas in your business that you must be continually improving as well, but we will talk about those at other times.

"Life is much too short to drink bad wines!" ("Das Leben ist viel zu kurz, um schlechten Wein zu trinken!") ~Anonymous saying from Germany

Live Music at the Tasting Room

Have y'all been in to catch the live jazz that we have every Friday from 7:30 until 9:30? If not why not start this Friday. Bring a friend, get a bottle of our new wine Friday's Folly (only $9.99!), relax on the super-comfy sofa and enjoy the music. If you need a bite to eat, then in addition to the chocolates at Belvedere you can order up a couple appetizers such as different pizzas or bruschetta prepared by the great people at Trattoria on Pearl. We also offer gourmet cheese plates which are a great match for the wines that we offer. Anyway here is the list of musicians playing for us over the next few weeks. See ya there!

Friday, Nov. 30th
Molly Greacen, Brazilian Jazz

Friday, Dec. 7th
Joao Junqueira - Brazilian samba, guitar and vocals

Friday, Dec. 14th
Bill Kopper – Guitar, Brazilian Music

Friday, Dec. 21st
Peneplain – Jazz

Friday, Dec. 28th

Holly DeHoog - vocals

Using Referral Gifts to Grow Your Business (Part 2 of 3)

"I have lived temperately ... I double the doctor's recommendation of a glass and a half of wine a day and even treble it with a friend." ~Thomas Jefferson

This is the second of a series of guest articles, written by me Jack Bergstrom, for my friends at BookCliff Vineyards. Tis getting near the season for giving and these articles are a bit about making the process of giving more effective and more fun! You can read more tips and techniques for your business at JackBergstrom.com. And now for the article...

I like to give referral gifts and I like to show gratitude for the clients that have used me in the past. I have experimented over the years with all manner of Christmas and referral gifts. Chocolates, tinned cookies, turkeys, hams, cash and gift certificates, food baskets and fine wines. Each of them has worked well for the right person. What does working well mean? They accepted the gift, they appreciated the gift, it was something they could use or enjoy consuming and it made them more even more likely to use me again or to refer me.

Let's look at each of these pieces:

• They accepted the gift. You must be careful that your gift does not violate any company policy about accepting gifts from vendors. What does this mean? Don't give any sort of gifts to employees of large companies that you do not know well and you have not asked the person you would like to gift first. Since the atmosphere and the words that you use while giving a gift mean as much or more than the gift, this is easy to do. "I would really like to show you my appreciation for our work together. Are there any things that I should know about your ability to accept a gift?" Doing this over a nice lunch also helps.
• They appreciated the gift. Hopefully you have collected some information about your client in the course of working with them. What do they like and dislike? Do they drink alcohol? Wine or liquor?
• The gift was something they could use or enjoy consuming. Spend as much as you can justify on your gifts. How much is this? It depends on your clients and your average ticket and, if full tax deductibility is important to you, the IRS must be included in the calculation. I also want my name and image always associated with high quality...don't you?
• It makes them even more likely to use me again or to refer me. The quality and appropriateness of the gift makes a difference here. Telling the client that you are genuinely grateful, and being genuinely grateful, for their past business and any referrals makes a difference.

You may notice that the quotes on today's entry are related to wine. I have used quality wine as a referral and thank you gift many times in the past and I continue to use it today. As long as I have verified first that my clients appreciate wine, then this is my go to gift. I wanted to recommend to you a Colorado based winery that I feel makes a truly superior product. (Their wine has won numerous awards so many others feel this way as well.) If you are thinking about wine as a thank you gift this season, then consider buying from BookCliff Vineyards. Start your exploration of their Colorado grown and produced line of wines right here on their blog.

I have know the owners since they started this company and the uniqueness of a great Colorado wine will do great things for the effectiveness of your gift. They will even create custom labeled wine for you.

I wanted to thank Robin Garr's Wine Lover's Page at http://wineloverspage.com/ for some ideas about quotes regarding wine. This is a nice site for wine lovers to visit.

"In Europe we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary." ~Ernest Hemingway; A Moveable Feast

Using Referral Gifts to Grow Your Business (Part 1 of 3)

The only people with whom you should try to get even are those who have helped you. ~John E. Southard

This is a guest article written by me, Jack Bergstrom, for my friends over at BookCliff Vineyards. I have had the pleasure of knowing Ulla and John, the owners, since they started the award winning vineyard and I have known and liked Justin since I first met him in April of 2007. I am a Executive Coach, a Business Consultant, a Seminar Leader and an Author. This is the first in a series of 3 articles about using referral gifts to grow your business. For more tips and techniques on working less, achieving more and having a blast along the way, check out my blog at http://jackbergstrom.com/. Hope to see you there!

I love doing business by referral. I love for past clients to send me my newest clients. Since I am selective and work only with people that I like, and people tend to associate with people like themselves, I am continually presented with the marvelous opportunity of working with people that already know something about me, already know most of the benefits of working with me and are at least somewhat presold on the value proposition that I represent. This is a wonderful way to do business. Now not every business can attract all of their customers this way, but the more customers that you get by referral the happier and more profitable you will be. Given that, I thought I would take a few entries here on my blog and talk a bit about using gifts to help grow your referral business.

This is a topic that is perennially hotly debated. I know business people that have an absolute "no gift" policy. I know business people that have informal policies about gifts and evaluate each client separately. I know business people that make explicit and well structured "referral programs" a major part of their new client acquisition plans. These "referral programs", I believe, are worth a series of articles of their own and really are no longer in the "Gift" category. We will talk about structured programs another time.

For today, let's start to look at gifts, the idea of rewarding people for sending you clients. Let me start by saying that at the simplest level, you should reward everyone that sends you business in this way: Be grateful! Thank them! Thank them lavishly! Let them know with a note, a card, a phone call or all of the above! If someone has gone out of their way, and put their own reputation on the line, to recommend me and my services, then I am going to be grateful...genuinely grateful! It doesn't happen that often. As good as I am, I know that the vast majority of my current and past clients do not wake up in the morning with a burning desire to see who they can refer to Jack today. It would be great, but it just doesn't often happen that I have quite that level of top of mind awareness. Indeed, I would be concerned if I did! So, at the simplest, and yet most profound level, be grateful and thankful! Thank them!

Now, going to the next level about gifts. Do I recommend using gifts and I do I use them myself? Yes and Yes. I do and I do! The trick is in knowing what kinds of gifts will give you the best return on your dollar and of course, the most satisfaction. I love to give people gifts! It's a hoot! Tomorrow we will talk more about thoughtful and effective gift selection and for those of you with a strict "no referral gift" policy, prepare to be challenged!

Till next time...Jack

When eating bamboo sprouts, remember the man who planted them. ~Chinese Proverb

Tis The Season...(for custom labels)

It's that time of year again. Need gifts for your employees or clients? Or do you just want to give your family and friends something really special this year? How about Colorado wine with custom labels!?! We offer our BookCliff Chardonnay and our Ensemble wine with your custom designed label on every bottle. What a great way to say thanks to your clients or to give as gifts at your wedding or holiday party. The possibilities are endless. Show people that you're proud of Colorado by giving the gift of Colorado wine. Here is an example of a custom label that we do every year. This is the label for the Flagstaff Star wine, by the way you can now find this wine at Boulder liquor stores and at our tasting room on 15th and Pearl St. We have a couple different pricing options available for the custom label program. You can call us at (303) 499-7301 or email me at justin@bookcliffvineyards.com if you have any questions or may be interested. High quality labels with your information and high quality local wine, what else can I say?