Advancing technology has increased wholesale productivity. Wholesalers are now shifting online. Sellers are using technical means to improve sales and work performance. They begin selling on either their own website or a wholesale marketplace to grow their businesses. Technology helps them make more profits with lesser effort and investment.
If wholesalers want to improve their productivity, there are seven ways to boost it:
- Track business analytics
- Use the best CRM software
- Manage inventory
- Train sales team
- Implement PIM software
- Strong teamwork communication
- Excellent customer service
Track business analytics
Your research is incomplete without data. You need to collect your previous history to understand the current state of productivity. Use statistics by technological tools to track your data business analytics. These statistics forecast the future state of your wholesale business. These help you to make judgments.
There are three steps of business data analytics:
- Descriptive analytics
- Predictive analytics
- Prescriptive analytics
● Descriptive analytics
Descriptive analytics is a process of using historical data of your business to understand the changes. Companies use data to highlight their strong and weak points. This is useful to make future decisions about the business. 90% of companies use descriptive analytics.
You can collect data for descriptive analytics in two ways:
- Compile data from databases to prepare a data set
- Extract data from large datasets to get useful insights for business
The following metrics and key performance indicators (KPI) are used for descriptive analytics:
- Annual price changes
- Monthly sales growth
- Revenue per customer
● Predictive analytics
Predictive analytics forecast the future state of the business by using artificial intelligence, historical, and present data. 52% of businesses use predictive analytics. Predictive analytics help wholesalers to:
- Forecast future demands of the customers
- Gain a competitive edge against competitors
- Improve the quality of their production
- Prepare more effective marketing campaigns
Tools like Oktopost and Dreamdata provide useful analytics to B2B businesses to improve revenue generation.
● Prescriptive analytics
Prescription is used by doctors to recommend precautions or medicine to a patient to treat a disease. Similarly, in the wholesale business, prescriptive analytics is a process of analyzing raw data through technology. It helps businesses take steps to improve their weaknesses and grow. Good prescriptive analytics help businesses to make important decisions.
Use the Best CRM software
Wholesale businesses use customer relationship management (CRM) software to improve relations with clients and save time so that the sales team can focus on other tasks such as:
- Making more sales
- Increasing productivity with less effort
CRM software helps you in:
- Generating leads
- Managing contacts and sales
- Providing effective customer service
- Getting analytics on current sales, revenue, profits, customer service, and marketing campaigns
- Automating work procedures
Wholesale companies increase their revenue by 839% by using CRM software. You can use CRM software on multiple channels such as mobile phones.
You can use CRM tools such as Salesforce, which dominates the worldwide CRM market by about 20%.
Manage inventory, sales, and orders
Sales management
Wholesalers can use sales management tools like HubSpot Sales Hub and Pipedrive to:
- track the progress of their sales representatives daily
- help sales representatives in completing their sales targets
- understand and track KPIs of the business
Order management
Sellers can use the order management software such as Odoo and QuickBooks Commerce to:
- Track all orders and monitor the complete progress
- Complete orders quickly
Inventory management
Automating inventory management is a great way to boost wholesale productivity. It is possible by installing inventory management software. Inventory management software is helpful to:
- Forecast demand for products
- Generate invoices
- Manage sales and purchase orders
- Prevent backorders, dead stock, and overselling
- Provide insights into sales
- Provide the stock keeping units (SKU) and reorder points
- Reduce the chance of human errors while counting inventory
- Track the stock levels of your inventory in real-time
You can use all-in-one platforms like Zoho, SeeBiz, and Orderhive. They are some of the best inventory management software for wholesale businesses.
Train and assemble a sales team
You should improve your number of sales reps to increase productivity. Most sales departments find productivity to be the biggest challenge for them. However, the sales team plays a vital role in the growth of a business.
Despite switching to online, you still need to rely on your sales team. Chatbots have done the job very well but they are based on artificial intelligence. 85% of artificial intelligence projects fail. Your sales team coordinates with your buyers via live chat support to respond to their queries. So, it is important to assemble the sales team.
82% of B2B buyers have complained that sales representatives are unprepared. 78% of them fail to deliver case studies of previous customers, 77% of them do not understand buyers’ needs and 75% do not even know proper details about their company. These statistics are alarming. Companies need to train their sales representatives fully.
The aforementioned software like CRM, sales management, order management, and inventory management help your organization automate processes. It reduces time and effort. Sales teams can track and manage sales, orders, customer relations, and inventory easily. They can save time in working on an effective marketing strategy.
If your salespeople are inefficient then you need to create strategies and train them accordingly.
- Firstly, educate them about the complete information about your business. Buyers want to know the details of your company. So, educate your sales team so that they can answer the query of buyers.
- Secondly, salespeople should know about the companies:
- buyer needs
- company policies
- products
- sales objectives
- target audiences
- unique selling points
- Thirdly, motivate and inspire your sales representatives with speeches and quotes to build self-esteem and perform better.
- Fourthly, assign goals to your sales representatives to complete these goals within a specified amount of time. The need to achieve goals provides a sense of responsibility to the sales team.
- Fifthly, salespeople should be able to provide case studies and examples of previous customer experiences with new buyers. Case studies are very important for 52% of their buyers when they are studying their vendors.
Implement PIM software
Product information management (PIM) software stores and manages all the information about the company’s products. It also shares it through the distribution channels of a supply chain. Businesses are using PIM software to efficiently manage and share information about their products. The PIM software market is expected to grow to $31.84 billion by 2025.
The PIM software help to:
- Boost conversion rate
- Fasten the production
- Increase product awareness
- Import and sort data easily
- Provide accurate information about the product to customers
- Validate data
Use best product information management tools such as Syndigo and Salsify to improve productivity for your small wholesale businesses.
Strong teamwork communication
Effective teamwork is essential to increase the productivity and revenue of a wholesale business. Your sales representatives can attain teamwork by communicating with each other on marketing strategies. If your employees are aligned, they can produce better results. 37% of employees believe that teamwork is very important.
But most companies do not have efficient teamwork. 39% of employees complain of a lack of collaboration.
Let’s see step-by-step how to improve teamwork communication to strengthen your wholesale productivity:
- Select the right employees for your team carefully who are worthy of completing multiple tasks.
- Create a diverse team with people of different ages, races, and genders. A variety of opinions produces better output that is profitable for business.
- Assign tasks to all the members of your team. This empowers an individual to perform better and feel his importance as a contributing member of the team.
- Choose the right leadership to instruct and manage the team with good leadership qualities.
- Discuss all the stages of your project with teammates for better consulting and improvement in weak points.
- Appreciate the performance of your employees.
- Recognize the importance of contributions of your workgroups to the success of your organization. It boosts the profits of a business by 29%.
You can succeed in these steps by using good collaboration tools. These tools increase the productivity of your wholesale business by 30%. There are some good collaboration tools such as Google Docs and Microsoft SharePoint that provide your teams to perform their activities together in an interactive way.
Excellent customer service
Customers are important for the growth of a business. After all, a business can run only when a customer buys your product. So, it is important to satisfy your buyers.
But satisfying a B2B buyer is more difficult than a B2C buyer. B2C buyers usually have common needs but B2B ones have different needs. You have to reach each customer with a different approach.
You have to:
- Train your customer service team with the required information about your business and your products.
- Motivate them to behave politely with customers for a better customer experience.
- Resolve customer complaints.
- Provide a rapid response to their queries. 77% of customers want an instant response.
Companies provide customer service through various channels such as:
- Live chat
- Calls
- Social media platforms
- Emails
- Video chat
Use good customer service tools such as Zendesk and Quick Sprout to assist your customers to increase your wholesale productivity.