There’s a niche, un-sexy intersection between brand field sales reps and their wholesalers, which no tech startups have ever shown an interest in.
Traditionally, if you visit a store and want to help them order your product through their wholesaler, it’d be a tedious, manual task of typing out an email with all the relevant info and a lot of back-and-forth. This was the accepted way of doing things until I developed a mild obsession with improving the way wholesale transfer orders worked.
18 months ago, we launched the only product in the world (believe me, I’ve looked) which makes wholesale transfer orders a breeze. A single place where a brand can manage all of their wholesalers, product listings, prices and info. Plus, a simple interface to allow even the most in-experienced student to walk into any store and send an order to any wholesaler.
This week, we released a bunch of new features to further disrupt the way brands do wholesale transfer orders:
- Order statuses – it’s now possible to update the statuses of all the orders you’re putting through so you can keep track of which ones have been delivered and which haven’t.
- Wholesaler status update – your wholesaler can now click a link in the transfer order email and update the status of your order for you.
- Order comments and mentions – you can now leave comments on order activity to celebrate wins, ask a colleague for more info, or post updates.
- Historic orders – you walk into a shop and find out they already stock your product. Now you can record the fact that they ordered 4 cases of SKU X from Wholesaler Y, 5 months ago. Crucial when it comes to building accurate customer profiles.
- Customer / Distributor / Manager (internal) notes – from one page in our app, you can now generate three personalised emails in one click. You can specifically tailor notes for each party to make the whole ordering experience much more enjoyable and productive for everyone.
The secret to being successful in wholesale is building good relationships. Most brands aspire to win big, national wholesale listings, but it’s the regional (often cash-on-delivery) wholesalers who’ll be most willing to work with you. Investing early in these relationships, understanding their businesses and helping wherever you can will pay off in the long run.
Whether you already have reps supporting wholesale accounts or are interested in finding out how to put these processes in place, feel free to reach out if you’d like to see how you could use Bowimi.
