No business can succeed without sales. If your business is generating sales and customers are increasingly showing interest in your products or service, you’re on the path towards achieving business growth and success. However, with the rising demand for exceptional customer service and timely delivery of goods and services without unnecessary delays, you’ll need to not only stay on top of your entire sales process but also implement a legitimate distribution channel strategy. Otherwise, it’ll be impossible to increase sales, reach wider markets, and create satisfied loyal customers.
Without an effective product distribution strategy, it becomes difficult to manage your distribution channels, leading to less productive workers, slower delivery times, and poor service. In short, you end up with an inefficient and poor business model that leads to higher operating costs. So, the question is, how can you improve your company’s distribution efficiency to increase revenue while ensuring your customers are happy and satisfied? Here’s what you need to know:
Review Channel Intermediaries
A distribution channel simply refers to the different steps you’ve put in place to ensure goods or services reach the end-user. It’s important to note that few or many intermediaries may be involved depending on the product, type of customer, and your business’s goals.
In order to make the process of connection between your goods or services and the end-user more efficient and profitable, you should consider bringing on board more intermediaries. Instead of selling directly to your target audience, consider adding a wholesale distributor, retailer, and intermediary agents between your business and the end consumer.
This can be challenging and laborious initially, but it will certainly help you cut costs and increase sales volumes. Make sure you’re only working with intermediaries whose goals and business models align with yours.
Use Effective Distribution Software
Many companies face challenges when it comes to keeping up with an ever-increasing number of purchases and transactions. Furthermore, the distribution process often involves many in-congruent stages which have to function efficiently. But tracking the movement of products at each stage and seeing product flows, from production to delivery, is a major challenge for many businesses. And this usually impacts the overall efficiency of the business.
By implementing an effective wholesale distribution software solution, you can access real-time and historical data on your product flows, making it easier to predict product demands, changes in your supply chain, and other factors that are likely to affect your distribution channels or process. This means you can plan accordingly and prevent any emerging financial issues before they arise.
You certainly don’t want to be part of the 43 percent of enterprises that don’t put any effort to track their inventory or have a manual tracking system that’s so demanding. Using effective distribution software will save you a lot of money as you won’t need to hire staff to keep monitoring stocks and transactions. Consequently, it’ll improve your inventory management and save you from wasting time attending to menial tasks.
Measure and Track the Performance of Each Channel
You won’t know which channels or steps in the distribution process are working and which ones aren’t if you don’t measure and track performance. Furthermore, there’s no way your business will survive in today’s competitive business landscape if you don’t continuously improve and learn from your missteps.
Measure the performance of each channel, with respect to the number of intermediaries, regional sales, and total monthly revenue. You want to identify which intermediaries are strong assets to your business, and which ones are lagging behind— yet they are capable of delivering more productivity. Also, take the time to analyze possible roadblocks and challenges and find ways to resolve them.
Cut Down the Communication Gap
The importance of communication and building relationships with your partners cannot be overstated. Companies that don’t close down the communication gap between them and their intermediaries often end up wasting a lot of time and losing money. Therefore, you need to maintain effective communication to ensure a smooth and efficient distribution process.
If there are any issues or problems, be sure to communicate them with your partners and find ways to solve them.
Furthermore, you need to make sure all parties involved in the distribution process have access to the important data and information about your channels. It’s only through efficient communication that everyone will know which of your programs are working and what needs to be done to improve them.
Optimize Your Warehouse Operations
The warehouse is essentially the backbone of any product distribution business. It serves as the link between the supply of products and consumer demand for the same products. As such, it’s one of the areas that, when optimized, can improve the overall efficiency of your business.
You can improve performance in the workplace by optimizing your warehouse operations. When you use the right technology tools and software, you can overcome most of the challenges companies face including lack of inventory visibility, inefficient picking, layout disorganization, lack of team communication, and inaccurate order processing.
It’s important that you implement the most efficient and cost-effective ways to not only receive customer orders and manage inventory but also pick the products and deliver them to clients while ensuring exceptional customer service.
