With some aiming to maintain social distancing, while others are working from home, many businesses are continuing to adapt to what is the new normal: Working remotely, helping customers from afar vs. in person, while maintaining sales volumes and attempting to grow their businesses.
Given many B2B and wholesale businesses maintain a personal touch with their relationships and sales, it’s important to work to keep that feel going even in more challenging times. As such, here are a few ways you can leverage online order portal and Ecommerce tools to offer a similar B2B sales experience through the Internet.
Sales Quotes for Order Confirmation
Many salespeople will build orders with accounts in person at their locations, or on site at conferences. Salespeople take in the information they receive from their buyers and build an order in real time.
But if you can’t meet in person, it doesn’t mean salespeople can’t guide their customers to the right products. Meetings done over the phone, via audio or video conferencing, or even conducted by email can still be handheld on behalf of the buyer. A salesperson can build a sales quote, with the products they recommend for their account, and the buyer can accept the quote and complete a purchase quickly and easily.
This allows a salesperson to confirm for their accounts they’ve got the right products, while keeping the purchase process simple for buyers.
Customized Catalog and Pricing
Part of the challenge with wholesale sales is that different accounts may have access to different products, pricing, shipping, billing and more. Thankfully, the best of the latest generation of online order capture/management and Ecommerce solutions, such as Zoey, can allow for very granular controls over what each account sees, from the products they can shop to the pricing that they get, and what billing/shipping options are available.
This means that customers can get accurate information directly off the order portal, including what items they can order and at what price. Combined with Sales Quotes, your online capabilities can make it easier for your buyers to do their homework as to what the pricing will be.
Provide More Online Information
B2B businesses in the past provided printed catalogs to help their accounts identify more easily which items they needed to purchase, and provide a phone number to order. Once you have a website to replace expensive call center order taking, making sure a similar set of information that lived in your printed catalog is found online, or perhaps even more, is critical to ensuring buyers find your website useful. As such, the following features can help you with this:
- Table/Catalog View: Many times a catalog would use a grid of SKUs and pieces of relevant information for related products or products within a category so a buyer can quickly scan the options and find the precise item they need. This can be easily replicated in a B2B website or order portal.
- Product Attachments: Sometimes, it’s not an image that’s most important to make available, but instead some other sort of product information such as a marketing one-pager or a spec sheet. Product attachments allow non-image files such as PDFs or Word and Excel documents to be attached on the product page, providing the additional information buyers crave.
- Faceted Search: Allow for easy search filtering and deep diving by ensuring not just a fuzzy keyword search that gets through typos and other common issues, but Faceted Search that allows for further filtering by attributes to find the exact item needed.
Provide Real-Time Email Updates
Most Ecommerce buyers are familiar with the standard email order updates that get sent out as an order is processed and shipped, but you can also send additional emails with any sorts of updates on platforms like Zoey. This can provide an additional personal touch as you keep your buyers up to date on what’s going on with their order, as well as a sales quote.
An example of such an email could be something like “I’ve confirmed your order will be shipping on Monday – thanks for your patience!” By linking these messages inside the order system vs. sending a separate email, your comment/message history can also be retained and displayed on a given quote or order.
See How Zoey Can Drive Online B2B Sales
With in-person sales being hobbled, driving sales online can be critical. See how Zoey can give you the tools that will make your team successful. We offer a personalized demo of Zoey that shows how you can make the most of online sales. Request a demo below by contacting us through the form below:
