For a wholesale business to be successful and increase its sales, it’s not just about selling more products. The B2B wholesale and distribution dynamics are always changing, making it more difficult for wholesale businesses to keep up.
To increase sales, one must come up with effective strategies. You cannot just sit idly and expect retailers to buy from you, instead, you have to put in more effort to obtain customers, and attract new ones. We’ll help you by providing you with some useful tips on how to increase your B2B wholesale sales.
Build an online marketplace
If you’ve decided to go wholesale, building an online marketplace can help your business thrive. Wholesale distributors are considered to be at the heart of the world’s business, connecting with suppliers and customers, selling hundreds of thousands of products, and generating billions of dollars in revenue.
Developing systems that simplify the company’s order processing will help your business improve. A good online marketplace makes it easier for customers to purchase their products and services, attracting new customers, and keeping already existing ones coming back.
Improve your marketing strategy
If you want to increase sales, you need to bring about more leads and turn them into customers, but also getting repeat orders from your existing ones. The first step to doing that is improving your marketing strategies by attending trade shows and meeting new leads.
If you cannot do it in person, you can always use other types of strategies like sending emails, creating a referral program for existing customers, and sending product samples to qualified leads. You might also want to consider an SEO marketing strategy as it will help you rank at the top of results for keywords related to your business, driving more traffic to your site.
Offer special deals
A great way to convince the customers to buy more is to offer special deals to retailers. This will put you at a competitive advantage and help you move your merchandise easily and quickly. For example, you can offer discounts for large volume purchases which is a great way to encourage customers to buy more of those.
Other promotions to increase sales can be free shipping, special discounts for first-time customers, seasonal sales, and limited-time offers to encourage fast purchases. Running promotions and special deals periodically, can please your current customers and even attract new ones.
Provide outstanding customer service
Treating your customers with courtesy and a professional manner can go a long way toward creating loyal wholesale customers. Whether it’s online or offline, train your sales and customer service representatives to provide great customer assistance whenever and wherever they need to.
There are also other ways you can improve customer service. One can be improving customer experience on the website by offering free shipping, order tracking, customer reviews, and product recommendations. Another great thing would be adding a live chat feature to your website which will allow potential customers to ask questions and get quick answers.
Make ordering and shipping processes easy
Simplify the ordering process to make it easier for your customers to place their orders. You can use an inventory management system to help you speed up the processes of picking and packing. Some systems even offer shipment tracking through a smartphone to be able to detect any issues and provide solutions more early.
Another thing to consider is always staying active so the clients can contact you through phone or email. This will improve your sales process by providing fewer errors, delays, or backorders, encouraging customers to order and re-order from your wholesale business.
Create an incentive for referrals and gifts for new buyer’s first purchase
To encourage retailers to recommend your products you may want to consider creating an incentive program to reward them and offer a referral program to customers so they will recommend you to their network and connections. For example, Thorn Apple Valley, a maker of meat products like hot dogs and sausages, incentivized meat managers in supermarkets, increasing sales by 22%.
Offering gifts to new B2B customers will make it even more likely that they will once again select your company as its supplier. You can consider offering different gifts depending on the size of their initial order.
In closing
B2B wholesaling can be a profitable business if you pair it with an effective wholesale strategy. Although these tips might be just what you need to boost your business, always look for a new way to improve your business. Remember to be proactive and you will be able to grow your wholesale business in no time.
