Picture this, it’s Monday morning, you’re driving to work and you check your work phone. There are 30 voicemails waiting for you. You sit at your desk and start the boring task of transcribing all these customers' orders from voicemail to the ERP system. By the time you look up, it's already 3 p.m., and you have not had the time to do anything else to drive sales for your organization. And tomorrow, you have to do it all over again.
Does that sound like your present-day as a sales rep?
We have some good news for you. With digital ordering systems, your customers place orders directly online, and these orders are automatically transcribed into your ERP system. You no longer have to spend hours transcribing voicemails again.
Benefits of an e-commerce platform for distributor sales reps.
Save time
It is estimated that it takes approximately 30 minutes to transcribe a 5-minute voicemail order. When you’re handling multiple customers this translates into hours of your precious time. Online ordering frees up your time to focus on more important sales tasks such as acquiring new business, maintaining customer relationships and attending to customer issues.
“Before Cut+Dry, I spent my entire day on manual order entry. I would have to pull over on the side of the road to take orders on the phone in between customer meetings. Now, my customers can shop the catalog and edit their order guides on their own. Cut+Dry has given me time to actually talk to my customers more, discuss products, and spend time with them". - Micheal Vingiello, Sales Representative
More business
Now you’re spending your time on generating leads, prospecting or generating ‘street’ business, you’re bound to get more customers. A good e-commerce platform is geared to take in a high volume of orders efficiently. You don't have to worry about accuracy, promptness or errors. If there is any issue with an order, the system will promptly alert you so you can immediately resolve it.
Better communication
With real-time chat features and order issue reporting your customers don't even need to call you unless they really want to. You can attend to these issues seamlessly and always be in touch with them. You can communicate new products, offers and discounts, or seasonal offerings seamlessly through the platform. You can even do small surveys to gauge your customers' needs and wants.
Insights
E-commerce platforms can give you access to some amazing insights on how your customers are behaving - you can see what products are experiencing a dip in sales, or what products are trending and design campaigns to drum up sales of these items. When you have to keep track of thousands of SKUs, it is not possible to do so manually, so these insights are quite nifty to help out.
Smart assistant
The online ordering system is your smart assistant. It can prompt you towards things like items that your customer hasn’t ordered in a while, or items they have forgotten. You can immediately communicate with your customer and find out what’s going on - have they stopped serving a particular menu item? If so, you can swoop in with new product recommendations and even help them design a new menu offering.
So, all in all, an online ordering system is not just great for your customer, but also for you, as a sales rep. If these sound like awesome things to you as a sales rep, then you need to start convincing your executives to get on board the digital train.
