B2B Info Center

Everybody loves taking a new order from a customer. It’s in the fulfillment of the order that things can get a little dicey. If your business is like most, you haven’t quite found the perfect streamlined system for fulfilling customer orders as efficiently as possible.

Maybe the order is initially placed on an order form with a salesperson or over the phone with a customer service representative. That person may then input the order into an electronic system. Many companies then use multiple platforms to communicate the order information to various departments like billing, distribution, and customer service.

There are few things more exciting than getting a new sale. After all, selling your product or service is the point of being in business. Finally getting that sale from a client is often the culmination of a lot of hard work.

However, the very act of placing and fulfilling the order starts a whole new process that can be inefficient, time-consuming, labor-intensive, and vulnerable to mistakes and errors. First your salesperson has to place the order. Maybe they call the back office or send an email, or maybe they even write it down and bring it back to the office. Then someone in your office may have to contact your warehouse or fulfillment center to execute the order.

Streamlining your order management can be very beneficial for not only you, but your customers as well. B2B e-Commerce can get very complicated when dealing with an excessive amount of customers. Below is a great real life example of how order entry software can improve customer management.

Background

Our story starts with a very successful wholesale distributor of fresh produce to restaurants, schools and hospitals. They are in a highly competitive business that demands freshness, high quality, and exacting delivery schedules with very few errors. Pioneer Produce looked for an on-line sales order management system that is fully compatible with QuickBooks. As you may assume they selected Now Commerce. They wanted all their customers to be able to look at real-time stock statuses, view their standard and recent orders, and enter today’s order requirements without staff involvement.

Moving merchandise faster has a lot of benefits to the end customer, to the retailer, and especially to the wholesaler. Most of the low hanging wholesale business improvements are already in place, improvements like smart warehousing, bar-coding, racking and material handling equipment, better labeling, easy packaging, better transportation with same day or overnight deliveries, and all kinds of special purpose software that speeds up the process of getting merchandise to where it’s needed.

A wholesaler derives a lot of benefits from improving overall order management speed. None of these benefits is dramatic by itself, but together they add up to genuine business performance improvements – among them are

Providing sales reps with online order entry software that integrates with a back office accounting system can certainly make life easier for manufacturers, wholesalers, or distributors. First, we’ll take a look at what’s in it for the company, then we’ll see what’s in it for the reps.

Eliminate or reduce order entry at work