About
Ranch Rider Spirits
Ranch Rider Spirits makes classic Western cocktails in a can, using nothing but all-natural premium spirits, carbonated water and citrus. They started with Ranch Water, a common Texas bar call. It became a hit in Austin and grew in popularity throughout the Lone Star State before expanding nationally.
Founded in: 2019
By: Brian Murphy, interviewed here, and his University of Texas Business School classmate, Quentin Cantu
Learn more: ranchriderspirits.com
— THE TASK AT HAND
A first-of-its-kind canned cocktail startup was ready to expand nationally. Their liquid-to-lips strategy was the top priority for growth. But their lean team needed it to scale efficiently and drive ROI. Enter: PINATA.
— QUICK WINS
• More Return. Less Investment.
After implementing PINATA, Ranch Rider saw a significant increase in sell through at tastings, moving from an average of 5 packs to 8.3 packs sold per event. They attribute this improvement to better training, clearer expectations and greater accountability, fueled by PINATA.
In addition to signaling stronger demo performance, this increase in sales helped to predictably offset the cost of the events themselves, opening the door for expansion.
• More Insight. Less Guesswork.
Ranch Rider has been able to leverage actionable data captured in PINATA to craft a repeatable playbook to ensure efficient and high-quality execution of their liquid-to-lips strategy in each market.
• More Collaboration. Less Effort.
On the precipice of a national rollout, Ranch Rider’s one Marketing Director was able to standardize communication across their agency network — eliminating disparate emails, calendars, and Excel files.
• More Consistency. Less Chaos.
With a line of sight into individual tastings via PINATA, Ranch Rider honed best practices for successful tastings, created accountability (e.g. was the product served at the proper temperature?), and eliminated a major retail-execution blind spot.
"PINATA allows us to execute our liquid-to-lips tasting strategy in the most efficient way possible. PINATA enables us to uncover insights into our product that unlock growth and continue to drive this brand forward."
- Brian Murphy, Co-Founder Ranch Rider Spirits
— THE CHALLENGE
For a small team with big aspirations, field marketing is hard to manage and even harder to measure.
Early in the national rollout, the tracking of tasting events from Ranch Rider’s agency partners was disparate at best, providing very little transparency into what was happening in the field.
“Before PINATA, I remember receiving a PDF from a tasting agency long after the month ended, basically saying: ‘You owe us $3,000. Believe us,’” Murphy said. “There was one line item and not a whole lot of transparency into what actually occurred — no photos, no pricing, no competitive information, no confirmation, no data. We knew that expanding into 34 states with various PDFs and spreadsheets from different tasting agencies in every region would get really problematic, really quickly.”
— THE SOLUTION
Ranch Rider ran a test with PINATA in two markets, loved the line of sight into retail execution and actionable data dashboards so they deployed the platform to all 34 states.
— OPERATIONAL
COMPLIANCE
Ranch Rider has been able to drive a new level of compliance from their tasting agencies since rolling out PINATA. For instance, early in the rollout they uncovered that some of their agency partners were not properly cooling down products before tastings. They now require brand ambassadors to capture a time-stamped photo in PINATA showing products submerged in ice before a tasting, guaranteeing that they’re served ice cold.
Taking it a step further, the Ranch Rider sales team now receive notifications on their agencies’ performance from the field in PINATA. For example, they know when an agency has checked in for a tasting or they can see the number of cases they sold in real time.
“With real-time notifications, our sales team can follow up with an account and say ‘Hey, we were on time, and we saw we sold this many cases,’ Murphy said. “That’s like night and day compared to having no idea if they even showed up. From a compliance perspective, PINATA certainly provides a competitive advantage for us.”
— WORKFORCE
EFFICIENCY
As a startup, Ranch Rider Spirits must do more with less when it comes to retail execution compared to their more established competition. PINATA has helped them to be more efficient when rolling out, managing and garnering concise actionable data insights from their national tasting program. By consolidating scheduling, communication with agency partners and real-time reporting in one platform, PINATA has become the single source of truth for Ranch Rider.
“Before, we were tracking everything via email and in sales reps’ individual calendars and that was unmanageable,” Murphy said. “With PINATA, all parties have eyes on the same platform which is much more efficient. It saves a bunch of emailing back and forth and eliminates miscommunication on timing or where someone needs to be for an event.”
Ranch Rider has gained even greater efficiency with PINATA when it comes to the administrative activity needed following a tasting event.
“We can now manage a national tasting program with far fewer people thanks to PINATA,” Murphy said. “Imagine having to aggregate spreadsheets and PDFs from 50 different tasting agencies and roll that up into a format that made sense. PINATA is certainly saving us a lot of time on the admin front.”
— ROI
OPTIMIZATION
“The data we get via PINATA helps us invest in the right ways for our brand,” Murphy said.
Murphy has leveraged PINATA in many ways to turn real-time data into action. Here are some highlights:
• Maximizing Spend Efficacy
Each tasting is ranked on a scale of one through five in PINATA by the brand ambassadors. Ranch Rider takes that ranking along with how many people were sampled and how many people were sold to determine where to allocate future spend.
• Gaining Shelf Share
“Every time we sell into an account, they’re asking, ‘what are you doing to support the sell through of this product?’ or ‘what are you doing to drive traffic to my store,’” Murphy said. “They’re always asking for tastings. We certainly view PINATA as a great tool for driving sell through and proving value to our retail partners which in turn optimizes our presence in those accounts.”
• Liquid-to-Lips Optimization
“Looking at how our specific SKUs are performing at different tastings has been really interesting for us and just being able to provide guidance to our sales team has been a game changer,” Murphy said. “For instance, we uncovered that our tasting events that happen on Friday afternoons see almost twice as much traction as opposed to tasting events on Thursday afternoons—insights like that are HUGE for us.”
• Data-Driven Competitions
“Our team gets competitive and now that we can track performance and have real data for these competitions, they’re more excited and motivated to win,” Murphy said. “We had one tasting competition where they sold over 10 cases—we’d never seen anything like that before.”
• Eliminating the Sell-Through Blind Spot
“PINATA gives us another layer of data on top of Nielsen, or instead of Nielsen in some markets,” Murphy said. “It provides us an eye into actual pull through performance and the strength of our brand fit against that specific retailer’s account base.”
— BONUS
Two steers, one lasso: Leveraging BAs for merchandising
As part of their national tasting program, Ranch Rider requires their agency partners to report on merchandising compliance from the field. They’re getting photos of their shelf sets, information on pricing and competitive analysis all in the PINATA platform.
“It’s just a trove of data that has really been valuable from a merchandising perspective for our marketing team at HQ—we can monitor everything from our laptops,” Murphy said.
Accurate pricing is vital for Ranch Rider. They’re able to use data from PINATA to ensure pricing is within their suggested retail range.
“Price point analysis and compliance has been a really cool part of the PINATA platform for us,” Murphy said. “When we see data that shows our independents in a certain state are out of our suggested retail range, we put together a program with our distributor to get them back in line. We didn’t have that line of sight before using PINATA.”