Tasting Room Ambassadors Become a Lead Machine — Without the Paperwork

The Challenge

A craft bourbon distillery ran a single-barrel ambassador program that let individual customers — usually enthusiasts, restaurant buyers, or small retailers — commission their own barrel selection. It was one of the highest-margin offerings in the portfolio and the most relationship-driven. Ambassadors would bring in their own networks: friends who wanted a private barrel for a wedding, bar managers looking for a unique pours, collectors who wanted something truly one-of-a-kind.

The program worked well in person. At events and in the tasting room, ambassadors would collect contact information from interested parties and submit a form capturing all the details of the potential barrel order. But that’s where the process stalled.

Those submissions went to the distillery’s sales coordinator, who had to manually review each one, check Pipedrive to see if the prospect was already in the system, and then either create a new contact and lead or update an existing one. During busy event seasons, the coordinator might have 20 or 30 of these forms stacked up. She was spending five or six hours a week on data entry alone — time she needed for relationship management and event coordination. Worse, leads sometimes sat unworked for several days because the queue was too long.

For a program built on personal connection and timely follow-up, the administrative lag was a real liability.