Sales Portals for Wholesale Businesses: What to Look for

shutterstock_209370430Whether you’re the owner or the office manager of a small manufacturing or wholesale business, you personally know the frustrating daily challenge of trying to streamline processes across all your departments, not only to improve customer experiences, but also to help your devoted and diligent sales reps provide great service to their existing and new accounts. Without the use of an effective sales portal designed specifically for small wholesale businesses (with dreams of big B2B sales), this feat is hard to accomplish.

Here’s how a sales portal can significantly benefit your wholesale business:

An effective sales portal can streamline the sales process.

A sales portal delivers all the up-to-date customer and product information that helps your sales team effectively and efficiently service their customers and open new accounts. Utilizing a sales portal, such as software that integrates with QuickBooks, can create an online platform for your business that easily accepts, processes, and manages online orders. This eliminates any time potentially wasted waiting for a specific step in the sales process to be acknowledged, approved, or forwarded to the appropriate department.   

A user-friendly sales portal can (finally) connect all your departments.

Whether directly or indirectly, each department at your small business plays an integral role in your company’s ultimate goal: sales. From your Sales, Manufacturing, Purchasing, Customer Support, Shipping, Billing, and every step in between, all roads lead to the sales process. Sales portals seamlessly connect these integral parts of the whole. The sales portal should create a sense of camaraderie among your employees. It should enable them to understand and embrace how their individual roles connect with, influence, and impact your entire company’s success. Disconnected, disengaged segments of your small business make it impossible to identify both opportunities for future sales and potential problems that could affect current sales, referrals, and repeat business.  With a software program that integrates with your QuickBooks, you’ll reduce data entry and make key info available to all departments.

A state-of-the-art sales portal can stop the sales process from getting lost in translation.

Everyone at your company ought to know and understand not only the products, solutions, and services your company delivers, but also their individual role in that process so that from the customer’s order to the delivery, no one drops the ball. Your sales team, front-line service staff, and customer support people need to know what your customers are being promised, just as much as your accounting, manufacturing, and shipping departments should know their part in bringing those promises to fruition.

A 21st century sales portal sets your hands free.

You’ve already invested lots of sweat equity into conceptualizing and launching your business; on top of that, you literally spent countless hours, days, months (and maybe even years) creating an authentic product of which you are proud and passionate.  With the right sales portal, you no longer have to be tied down to doing everything at your business by hand. Embracing and implementing an effective sales portal software program that can easily streamline your business process will free you to create more unique products, to use your time to implement marketing campaigns, or simply give you a moment to catch your breath.

A simple sales portal can transform multiple systems into a single system.

Perhaps you are using either multiple systems or manual processes to run every different department and aspect of your company. You might have one system in place for logistics, another for production, a different one for inventory, one for sales and customer support, and still other ones for bookkeeping, accounting, and billing. Many small businesses operate this way.  It’s not unusual; it’s not wrong; it’s not bad. It’s just that it’s not the best. By having so many different, separated systems (or painstakingly doing everything manually, including having to recheck everything), you are missing out on real-time visibility and overall efficiency in your business operations. The solution? Increase the utilization of your accounting software and use a sales portal that integrates with it. It’s that simple. Streamlining from many (or no) systems into a simple, single sales portal enables you to get a quick, accurate, real-time overview of your sales backlog. As a result, it enables you to be proactive vs. reactive. Instead of putting out fires, you’re able to water more seeds.

Embracing the use of an effective sales portal can profoundly benefit your wholesale business. The sales portal solutions available today are designed specifically with you in mind. They’re created to keep your customers happy and your employees efficient.

order management system