How Bulk Businesses Cope With Large Sales Volumes
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Bulk businesses aren’t the same as regular companies. They have to deal with and manage large sales orders on a regular basis, sometimes hundreds or thousands of individual orders per day.
With this sort of volume, it is often challenging to keep everything running efficiently. Companies often run into trouble by failing to keep everything organised, pushing up their costs and reducing their customer satisfaction.
If you're worried your business might be in this position, then this post is for you. We look at some of the tools and methodologies you can use to cope with larger sales volumes, even if you are expanding rapidly from a low level.
Diversify Your Supply Chain
You can start by diversifying your supply chain so you always have the goods and products you need coming into your business. The more suppliers you have available to meet demand, the less likely it is that your clients will go without service.
Try to source suppliers from multiple locations and industries. The more redundancy you can build into the system, the better. Just ensure that the inputs you receive from them are the same, and that you focus on your relationship with them (so they prioritize you in a crisis, and not someone else).
Get Insurance
You can also look into getting insurance to protect yourself from losses. When you’re moving around large volumes of cargo, any destruction can be highly expensive and damage your company’s bottom line. You’ll want to fix this by taking out the right cover to protect against things like damage and unforeseen events.
Train Employees To Handle Volume
Another thing you’ll want to look into doing is training employees to deal with your high-volume operations. They should understand how everything works and why they have to perform in a certain way.
If you can get it right, it can ensure efficiency and mean that each person operates better at their station, reducing bottlenecks. Plus, once you have a proper training program in place, it makes it much easier to bring in new people during peak times to take care of additional processing.
Standardize Processes
You could also look into standardizing your processes and workflows so that every unit in your operation deals with bulk orders in the same way. Providing your employees with a standard operating procedure (SOP) is helpful because it shows them how they can work optimally and do the right thing for your business.
If you need to outsource to reduce errors and issues, then go for it. Often, you’ll find that the expense of getting someone else to do it is lower than if you kept the process in-house and constantly had to deal with human error.
Ensure Quick Pricing And Payments
Pricing and taking money also needs to be automated when you run a high-volume business. You can’t be spending all your time filling out forms and completing invoices.
Using a NetSuite sales order OCR makes sense if you’re receiving or sending invoices in PDF format. These tools can use optical character recognition to enter details into NetSuite for faster processing, removing a massive quantity of manual work almost instantly.
You can also use various AI-based tools for dynamic pricing. These adjust prices based on volume currently being sold, customer demand, and demographic characteristics. Once you have this information, you can often make a bet on charging more, allowing you to pump up margins for high-value customers.
Contract sales are also worth exploring. If you can establish these, you have a more predictable set of outputs you can fulfill every week.
Add Personalized Service
While it might sound strange, it is also a good idea to use personalized customer service as a bulk sales business just trying to thrive. If you can combine large volumes with excellent customer service, it can be a powerful differentiator.
The best way to do this automatically is with CRMs. These populate communications with customers’ names, making them feel special every time you want to contact them.
If you can provide each customer with a dedicated support manager who’s available around the clock, that helps, too. Large clients appreciate this sort of support, since they usually have more questions than average.
Use Loyalty Programs
If you simply can’t build out something as complex as this, then you might want to look into using loyalty programs. These reward customers when they buy more (in bulk) in a way that actually benefits you and your margins.
Bulk offers like these can be highly attractive for a lot of clients and customers. Many will choose to stay with you, even if there is the prospect of a better deal elsewhere, just because you’re offering something a little less expensive.
Remember, loyalty points and rewards can often be more powerful than discounts because they work differently on a psychological level. Many people prefer to earn points from you because they worry about missing out.
Automate As Much As You Can
Finally, you can cope with large sales volumes by automating as much as your business as possible, whether you sell B2B or B2C. If you can pass over the majority of the rote work to software, AI, and computers, you’ll spend far less time putting out fires.
For example, if you’re selling online, don’t try to build your own service. Instead, take a look at the market and see if there are any platforms that will do most of the work for you, like Magento or Shopify. These are built with high transaction volumes in mind, so that isn’t a bottleneck.
Also, if you have a lot of customers trying to get in touch with you, use automation tools. These allow you to process orders and invoices quickly, sometimes using chatbots. Again, these systems remove the need for expensive and repetitive manual data entry tasks, which can be annoying.
Lastly, use as much data as you can to optimize things like pricing and identify trends. If you can get ahead of the curve on this stuff, you’ll often make a lot more money.
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