Whether you have a physical warehouse for supplying your wholesale customers or you’re a digital drop-shipping distributor, you’ll run into the same problems business owners have had for hundreds of years.
Management challenges, inventory issues, keeping customers coming back, etc.
The biggest problem that distribution businesses have isn’t any of those. It’s time.
Your biggest problem is effective time management.
Without enough time, you can’t build your business. You can’t research new opportunities, look into new solutions, or solve the bigger problems such as staffing, team management, and so on.
So, how do you free up time for yourself or your team to grow your business?
With these five tips:
1: Plan out your business goals as projects.
This is such a simple suggestion that you’re probably rolling your eyes already.
But planning out your goals as projects lets you see how much time and resources you need to see something through.
From website redesign to reorganizing inventory, planning the project takes time initially but will save you more time as the project progresses. It’s such an essential part of effective project management that project management courses feature entire sections around the planning process.
So to save time overall, plan your business projects before starting them.
2: Prioritize those projects.
As important as planning your projects in the first place, you have to prioritize what matters the most.
Sure, having a flashy new website is nice and may draw more customers in – but if the ordering system you’re using when you build that new site is broken, you’ll have problems. Customers hate broken ordering systems, meaning you’ll lose them to your competitors.
So, the higher priority project should ensure your ordering system is working properly, not that new website. Even if the website looks flashier on the surface, it’s worthless if your customers don’t get any value from it.
3: Streamline your ordering process.
How your customers place their orders is vitally important.
If it is too complicated, they won’t come back or buy as much as possible because dealing with your business is too difficult.
Without an ordering process that makes it easy for your customers to buy from you, you’ll lose them any time a competitor comes along with an easier process.
Your ordering process doesn’t need to be fancy or extravagant, either. As long as it’s easy to use and understand and provides the information customers are looking for, it’s meeting the needs it should.
If you’re using QuickBooks, you may not offer online ordering yet. QuickBooks may be more robust accounting software, but it doesn’t sync with digital ordering systems on its own.
There’s a solution for that – which you can read about here.
4: Streamline your fulfillment process.
When you have a physical location, fulfillment is more than typing into a computer or clicking a button – you have a team and inventory to manage and pack to get shipments out.
Order fulfillment becomes fast and easy with a software bridge between your warehouse management system, QuickBooks, and an online ordering portal. Your office team reviews orders as they come in, and they’re sent to the warehouse, picked, packed, and shipped out.
The customer gets tracking information, and both your office and warehouse team save hours by not having to copy, fax, email, or call about orders.
That level of efficiency will give you the time to focus on growing your business. Your team will have time to work on problems they never quite solve, and customers will be happier about the transparency of the status of their orders.
Now Commerce is the tool that will allow you to offer this to your customers. Trust us – your office team will thank you for saving them time in fulfillment.
5: Automate as much as you can.
You can’t exactly hire robots to replace all of your employees, but you can automate many other aspects of running your distribution business.
The more customers you can move to filling out their invoices digitally on your ordering platform, the more time you will save. Customers can order exactly what they want and when they want, and they can see inventory status and pricing right in the ordering portal set up for them.
Your team doesn’t have to call customers, decipher voicemail messages, or send 20 emails back and forth to confirm pricing, quantities, and billing information.
With these digitally generated orders, it’s simple to review and approve them before passing them on to your warehouse team. This allows that streamlined fulfillment process you set up to do its work.
Questions on best practices for saving time?
Let the team at Now Commerce help you identify ways to automate and streamline your business.
Whether you’re a one-person shop or have an entire office team – if you’re using QuickBooks, Now Commerce could help your business.
