The wholesale industry is evolving and becoming more competitive each year. With the influx of new technologies, wholesale businesses are streamlining their ordering and shipping processes. With everyone competing for the smoothest business operations, outstanding sales techniques help push one business ahead of another. Today, we’ll go over six of the easiest and most effective sales techniques we have seen highly successful wholesale businesses use.
- Special Deals
If you can save retailers extra cash on orders, you can be sure that they’ll keep returning to your business. Customers are already saving money with a wholesale discount. But walking into a sales meeting with daily, weekly, or monthly deals further incentivizes stores to work with your company. The reward–you get to move merchandise more quickly and easily. Stores will keep an eye on the specials you offer, giving you a leg up on the competition. For example, you can track the bestselling items for your retailers and build a rewards program to encourage bulk orders. Deals are an easy sales technique to both increase your customer’s profits and lay the foundations for long-term loyalty.
- Keep an Order History
Loyalty is creating a sense of friendship above and beyond a business relationship—if you had a friend who stared at you blankly every time you said “Hey, remember that time when. . .” or “Who was it that said. . .” how strong would that relationship be? While data feels a bit cold compared to memories, using it to track your customer’s order history and organize that data into lists of their most purchased items serves the same purpose. It means instead of staring blankly back at your customer at a sales meeting, you can walk in totally prepared with a list of their most ordered products so you’re ready to talk about the products that matter to them most. This sales technique greases the wheels of a sales meeting and lets you get straight to the point.
- Provide Recommendations
This goes hand-in-hand with tracking your customer’s ordering history. When you know your customer’s business inside and out, you can recommend the products that are going to sell best for them. Making solid recommendations cements you as a trusted advisor, and also gives you the opportunity to market a larger variety of products. The retail landscape is constantly changing. Keeping up-to-date on hot products for each store adds legitimacy to your brand. It shows you care about them as an individual customer and shows that you are actively engaged in following the market. Walking into a sales meeting ready with recommendations goes a long way.
- Limited Time Offers
Urgency is one of the most powerful sales techniques. You can see it at work in all of those “limited time only!” sales emails, but it carries a lot more weight when the offer is coming from a reliable source. Creating a limited time-frame for special deals catches the customer’s attention and makes them act. Your customers will keep checking in if they know you regularly offer great deals, and if you track customer data and know what the popular items are you can offer deals that set you apart from your direct competitors.
- Referral programs
The more benefits you can give the customer, the better. Reaching new customer bases is a major pain for marketing departments, but referral programs are a sales technique that lets your customers do the heavy lifting. Both parties benefit–the customer gets a good deal, and you gain more business. Creating a program where the benefits stack with each referral is a strong sales technique and starts a snowball effect of each new customer referring others to claim the rewards. It is easy to implement, easy to sell, and extremely effective in the long-term.
- Great Customer Service
Sales is an ongoing process, especially in the wholesale industry where stores shop around with different wholesalers. Inevitably, shipments go awry, orders get misplaced, and information gets misinterpreted. Sometimes a few mistakes can drive off even loyal customers. However, if you have outstanding customer service you can defuse these situations and secure future sales. Customer service that is thoughtful, attentive, and thorough can sometimes make customers more loyal if you show how hard you work to keep things running smoothly.
There are plenty of sales techniques at your disposal besides a bright smile and a firm handshake. These tools will give you solid footing to compete in this competitive and ever-evolving industry.
If you’d like to work with a company who understands the complexities of the wholesale industry, contact us at Mobisoft (call 952 – 215- 1680) today!
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