Post Link: Order Taking App Transforming In-Person Sales: Infographic

Order Taking App Transforming In-Person Sales: Infographic

While many wholesalers, distributors, and manufacturers have already invested in back officesystems to run operations, there has been a shift recently toward focusing on investing intechnology to improve the sales process.

Businesses are looking to equip sales reps with a more efficient way of taking down orders thanthe paper order forms of years past––an order taking app that includes customer information, adigital catalog, and a digital order writing interface on a mobile device. Today, the speed andefficiency of this new digital order writing process is directly affecting back office operations.

Download the Transforming In-Person Sales Infographic here.

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Why an Order Taking App is Necessary in Today's SalesEnvironment

When asked to rank their biggest order management challenges, wholesalers surveyed citedorder writing inefficiencies as their biggest pain point. These inefficiencies commonly stemfrom manual processes like order writing using paper order forms, Excel spreadsheets orcumbersome PDF forms.

When orders are taken by hand, illegibility, human error, and delayed order submission from thefield to the back office can be extremely common. Other pain points included sales reps sellingwith inaccurate information, as well as orders being placed for out-of-stock products.

As it turns out, many wholesalers have already looked to rid their sales processes of suchinefficiencies. Of those surveyed, order writing software was the primary method of writingorders (39% of respondents), 10 percentage points above the next most common order writingmethod. Of the wholesalers not using technology to write sales orders, paper order writing wasthe most common at 29%, with PDF order forms (14%) and ordering using Excel (12%) trailingbehind. Notably, 25% of respondents are planning on investing in order writing software overthe next 12 months.

A Look at Companies Already Using an Order Taking App

Among the respondents currently using order writing software, the vast majority––81%––aretaking advantage of third party solutions, with just 19% of respondents using proprietarysolutions. Indeed, given the prohibitive up-front cost of proprietary solutions, the extensiveinvestment required for ongoing maintenance, and the challenges of making feature updates,more and more businesses across all industries––including those outside wholesaledistribution––are turning to off-the-shelf SaaS solutions for their technology needs. The cloudsubscription model, in which maintenance and upgrades are all taken care of by the vendorrather than internal IT staff, is providing the rapid time-to-value that agile companies need tomake key process changes.

Interestingly, order writing software adoption rates in several industries exceeded the survey-wide rate by a significant margin. Industries like Eyewear & Optical and Toys, Baby & Kidsstand out as leaders in the transition to digital order writing, with 64% and 62% adoption,respectively. Other industries, such as Apparel (33%) and Beauty & Cosmetics (29%) havebeen slower to make this change.

While brands in industries that have seen a higher than average adoption of order writingtechnology must make these investments to catch up to companies that have already, those inindustries with lower adoption rates have an opportunity to forge ahead and gain a competitiveadvantage.

Also notable, 83% of wholesalers using order writing software are able to get their orders to theback office in less than 24 hours, compared with just 67% of respondents using manual orderwriting methods. 49% of wholesalers using order writing software can get their orders into theirback office in less than 1 hour, compared with just 17% using manual methods. This clearly

demonstrates that efficiency gains in in-person sales can extend into the entire order fulfillmentprocess.

This blog post features just a few insights from our recently published Wholesale Technology &Sales Survey Report. To get more information on the current state of the wholesale distributionindustry and how you stack up to the competition, you can download the entire report forfree here.Post originally located at: https://www.handshake.com/blog/order-taking-app-infographic/

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