Trading and distribution
Your orders arrive on WhatsApp. Your business cannot see any of them.
Retailers message the salesman, the salesman messages the office, the office types it into the system. Every order passes through a phone the company does not own, and when that phone leaves, the customers often leave with it.
The problem an owner already knows
Illustration of a typical day today: one handset, one group, nothing the business can see. Names are examples.
- The customer belongs to the phone, not the company
- Every conversation, price agreed and complaint sits on a personal handset. When a salesman resigns, the company has no record of what was promised to whom.
- Orders are retyped, and retyping goes wrong
- A message becomes a line in a book, becomes a line in the system. Each hop is a chance to lose a quantity, a rate, or the order entirely.
- The price list is out of date the moment it is sent
- A picture of a sheet forwarded onward, and then forwarded again next month by someone who did not check.
- Chasing money takes a person all week
- Statements go out monthly, and the follow-up is one salesman with a list and a phone, working through it when there is time.
What it looks like afterwards
Illustration of the same day afterwards. The marked messages were sent by the business’s own system. Names are examples.
- One business number, and the conversations stay
- Retailers message the company, not an individual. Each salesman still handles their own accounts and sees their own conversations, and the record belongs to the business permanently.
- Price and stock lists that go out correct
- A current list sent to the customers who should get it, from the company, at the moment it changes. Not a photograph of a sheet from last quarter.
- Dispatch and delivery, tracked without a phone call
- Loaded, dispatched with the vehicle, delivered with a proof of delivery. This is the single biggest reduction in inbound calls for a distributor.
- Payment reminders that go out on time, every time
- A quiet message before a due date and a receipt after payment, sent by the system rather than remembered by a person.
- Coverage you can actually see
- How many customers were contacted this week, how fast enquiries were answered, and which accounts nobody has spoken to in a month.
Your salesmen do not lose their customers
This works best when it is put to a sales team as the company taking the admin off them, which is what it is: no retyping, no chasing, no personal phone ringing at 10pm. Conversations are still assigned to the person who owns the account. What changes is that the business keeps the history.
Where we usually start
- 1
The number your customers already know
Usually the office landline or the main business mobile. It keeps working as it does today and gains a team behind it.
- 2
Order acknowledgement first
The retailer gets a confirmation with what was ordered, at what rate. It stops the most common dispute in the business before it starts.
- 3
Then dispatch, then money
Delivery updates once the acknowledgement is trusted, and payment reminders after that, because the reminders only work when the earlier record is clean.
One thing to decide before the demo
Whether your salesmen keep messaging from their own phones alongside this. Both arrangements work, and they lead to different setups, so it is worth having an answer.
Our own view: move the ordering to the business number and let personal phones carry the relationship. The company gets the record it needs and the salesman keeps the rapport that makes them good at the job.
Do you make what you sell?
If you manufacture rather than resell, the pressure sits in a different place: job enquiries, artwork approvals and production updates rather than order taking and collections. That page is here.
Bring a week of orders to the demo
One week of how orders actually arrived and who typed them where. That is usually enough to show which part to fix first.
Book a demo