Personal visits from sales representatives are rare for individuals, but they're still typical in the B2B world. In many cases, this has more to do with the financial value of the orders a customer may place than the complexity of the product. Having the time to develop relationships with your customers is an important step in growing your business. Business customers like to see someone sitting on the other side of the desk if they're ordering hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of product - at least at first.
What customers often aren't too thrilled about is waiting for representatives to call order details in to the main office or watching them wait on hold when they call in queries. Then, a customer is more likely to appreciate it if the rep has a faster way to take care of the nuts and bolts. Fortunately, such a faster way exists - and is easy to implement. All you need to do is provide your salespeople with laptops or tablets so they can log into our sales order management software while they're at the customer's office or on the road. This allows your representatives to skip the calling and holding and proceed directly to taking care of the customer's needs. Here are more details about what Now Commerce will do to improve your wholesale company's in-person sales and service:
Instant Order Input
With our software, your sales reps are freed from the usual pattern of taking orders by hand and then reading them off to someone at the main office. Instead, they can use the customer's Wi-Fi to log on to the Now Commerce portal and just type the order in via their laptops, tablets, or other mobile device. The customer will be glad to have the wait time greatly reduced, but this is just one of the benefits of this system. It'll also make it so that only one person is involved in the order entry, and this can reduce error rates.
Fast Query Resolution
Many customer queries are simple and only require looking up some relevant facts like how many of an item your company has in stock, the processing phase of a prior order, or the specs of a specific item. With the old-fashioned way, your rep would have to call your own customer service department, wait for another rep to pick up, wait for her to look up the information, and finally, relay the answer to the customer. This adds workload to your service department and makes the customer impatient.
Such long processes are eliminated when you rep has a login for your Now Commerce system. All he or she needs to do is connect, and with a few keystrokes, the answers to questions like these will be right on the screen. The wait time will drop from minutes to seconds, and even better, your inside reps will be able to devote their time to answering more complex queries and placing orders.
Back Office Benefits
There are many operational benefits to giving your sales force access to this new system. This is because it integrates with your QuickBooks account. There are also warehouse capabilities so orders can be sent straight to the warehouse for fulfillment with a touch of a button. With old-fashioned systems, each department would have to be manually given the details from every order and then someone would have to enter the details into a different recordkeeping system for each one. As you surely know, there is a chance for errors to creep in every single time something is manually updated. Using software to update everything makes so that there is only one "touch" per order and greatly reduces the chance of mistakes. It also eliminates the problem of records and inventory becoming out of date since the software updates by itself whenever an order is submitted.
To learn more about how Now Commerce can speed order entry and improve customer service in the field, reduce costs back at the office, and streamline your back end systems, give us a call today. We'll be happy to explain how modernizing will help your company!
