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Here’s a startling statistic: Sales representatives spend only 32% of their time selling, while the rest of their time is spent on administrative tasks. This stat alone screams the state of inefficiency in the day-to-day operations of sales representatives. When talking about the fast-paced world of B2B wholesale, sales reps are often inundated with manual and repetitive tasks that consume valuable time. From managing inventory to creating custom product orders, these tasks can be time-consuming and not to mention, prone to errors.
However, by leveraging B2B sales automation, sales reps can reclaim their time and focus on what truly matters – closing deals and driving revenue. 50% of high-performing sales organizations have sales processes that are “closely monitored, strictly enforced or automated.
Let’s explore the different ways in which sales representatives lose valuable time and how B2B sales automation can turn the situation around.
Manual Processes That Are Making Your Sales Reps Lose Valuable Time
It’s a snowball effect when it comes to manual processes. When your sales reps spend valuable time on manual, repetitive tasks, it diminishes their efficiency because this is the time they could be spending on more sales, thereby affecting your revenue and larger goals. Here’s how it starts:
1. Out-of-Stock Management
Imagine you are in the middle of a sales conversation and a product you are showcasing goes out of stock. You start scrambling to find alternative products to pitch, which takes forever and also ruins the momentum of your conversation. It’s a struggle for sales reps to identify similar products or alternatives to offer to customers. This struggle can be easily overcome with B2B sales automation.
2. Live Inventory Updates
Keeping track of inventory levels manually can lead to discrepancies and errors in order fulfillment. Sales reps may spend significant time updating spreadsheets or checking inventory levels across different systems. Lack of real-time visibility of inventory would often result in errors like committing to orders that can’t be fulfilled because of errors in inventory data.
3. Order-taking at trade shows
Trade shows are a fast-paced environment with hundreds of visitors coming to your booth in a day. You need to have a fast and seamless order-taking process that streamlines your processes and delivers a delightful experience for your customers. With manual processes, sales reps would face challenges in accurately capturing product details and customer orders at trade shows. Manual data entry leads to errors and delays, hindering efficiency.
4. Generating tear sheets manually
Creating manual tear sheets with product information, images, prices, and layouts is a time-consuming process and prone to errors for sales reps. Moreover, customizing tear sheets manually is a pain, as is editing them and updating them with new information.
5. Processing custom product orders
Processing custom product orders requires manual communication between sales reps and internal teams. Without B2B sales automation, this process can be prone to errors and delays, leading to customer dissatisfaction.
6. Handling customer queries
Your sales reps probably spend a lot of time answering customer questions and concerns about their orders. B2B sales automation can facilitate real-time access to this information for your customers so your sales reps don’t have to spend a lot of time doing this.
How Can B2B Sales Automation Save Valuable Work Hours for Sales Reps?
1. Similar product recommendations
B2B sales automation that comes with an AI-driven engine can help recommend products similar to out-of-stock products. This saves your sales reps hours of searching and scouring and makes your sales conversations a breeze.
2. Live inventory updates
A B2B commerce platform that integrates with your ERPs and other existing systems can automatically update inventory levels across all platforms as soon as orders are placed. This way, you don’t have to spend hours updating it manually and worry about errors and discrepancies.
3. Scan feature for order-taking
With B2B sales automation, you can create custom product labels with your company logo, fonts, and barcodes/QR codes. At trade shows, all you have to do is scan and start taking orders in seconds. You can also record buyers with one click and add buyer notes directly on the platform.
4. Seamless tear sheet-generation
B2B sales automation allows you to shortlist products based on customer interest and create professional-looking tear sheets on the spot with minimal effort, freeing up time for more productive tasks. No more spending hours taking orders in order books and worrying about information loss.
5. Custom order processing
B2B sales automation can empower sales reps to customize product attributes, pricing, and specifications directly within the platform, reducing manual communication and order processing time.
6. Real-time order updates
With B2B sales automation, you can offer your customers order confirmations, status updates, shipment links, and so on, once they place an order with you. This way, your sales reps’ bandwidth is freed up.
The Way Forward
If you have stayed with us this far, you are no doubt wondering about the perfect platform to get started. Well, look no further!
With WizCommerce’s B2B Commerce platform, you get similar product recommendations for out-of-stock products, seamlessly generated tear sheets, a quick-scan feature for order-taking at trade shows, real-time inventory updates across all platforms, and so much more!
So, stop wasting time on manual processes. Get your sales processes automated and focus more on closing deals! Book a demo now.
