Overcoming B2B Order Taking Challenges in Wholesale & Distribution

B2B (Business-to-Business) order taking is complex and challenging when dealing with wholesale and distribution orders. B2B order taking has challenges such as inaccurate data, slow processing, and errors caused by manual entries, which affect your customer retention, revenue, and operational efficiency.

With the rise of fast shipping and delivery, B2B buyers expect a level of convenience and speed. You can overcome these B2B order-taking challenges by implementing automated order taking workflows, efficient order taking processes, and leveraging technology such as order taking software. 

In this article, we break down the biggest order taking challenges, best practices for streamlining order processes, leveraging technology to overcome these challenges, and key metrics to measure.

The Biggest Order Taking Challenges in Wholesale & Distribution

There are several challenges in B2B order taking when working in wholesale and distribution because it is a complex and high-stakes process due to the high volume of orders. Key challenges include manual data entry, which leads to errors and delays, a lack of real-time inventory visibility, inefficient communication between sales and operations, and accurately managing large and complex orders. 

In today's fast-paced environment, businesses face pressure to process and deliver orders quickly, accurately, and efficiently. With B2B, this goes a step further because other companies rely on the wholesale goods. It's a complex chain in B2B, especially with how fast consumers move. Order taking at this level can make or break customer relationships.

Manual Data Entry Leading to Errors & Delays

A big challenge is that wholesale and distribution companies still rely on outdated or manual order-taking systems. This leads to inaccurate data, a lag in processing orders, and costly human errors that are detrimental to business and key customer relationships. 

Manual data entry invites typos, incorrect SKUs, pricing discrepancies, and incorrect order amounts. These errors often result in returns, customer frustrations, and delays in getting inventory to your customers.

Lack of Real-Time Inventory Visibility

A lack of real-time inventory visibility is a costly challenge for B2B companies that results in backorders. Without real-time inventory visibility, your team could frequently promise out-of-stock items, resulting in frustrated customers and a damaged relationship if it happens often. 

For example, let’s say you’re a distributor of eco-friendly cleaning supplies. Without real-time inventory visibility, you trust that you have enough inventory for your two biggest customers. If you updated your inventory at the end of the day, you realised that the first of your two big customers ordered extra inventory that morning, leaving your other key customer with a backorder of products.

Inefficient Communication Between Sales & Operations

A key challenge in order taking is inefficient communication between sales and operations teams. A lack of communication between two key teams in B2B can lead to shipping wrong components, missing deadlines, and overpromising inventory items that don't exist. 

For example, let’s say you're a B2B company selling tech parts. Your sales reps didn't have access to live order status or warehouse timelines. Management systems that don't communicate lead to siloed teams all operating inefficiently. Siloed teams can't move to the pace of modern distribution if there is little to no communication between sales and operations.

Managing Large, Complex Orders Accurately

A common challenge in order taking is managing large, complex orders accurately. Complex orders can get out of hand and grow without the right systems in place for you and your teams. Without a proper system, your team can find themselves juggling spreadsheets, PDFs, and separate emails to communicate and finalise orders. This leads to errors and slow delivery times that are costly for both you and your customer.

How Poor Order Management Hurts Your Business

Poor order management creates issues that impact customer retention, revenue, and your operational efficiency. Due to stock inaccuracies, your business suffers from lost sales, which leads to slower fulfilment and customer dissatisfaction. Poor management also increases your administrative costs, as outdated systems can drain your team's operational bandwidth.

Lost Sales Due to Stock Inaccuracies

Poor order management leads to lost sales due to stock inaccuracies. Without a proper system that tracks your inventory in real-time, your sales team may unknowingly sell out-of-stock items. This creates backorders, which could lead your customers to cancel their orders. 

For example, your team might quote a bulk order, only to discover those SKUs have already been allocated to another customer. Accurate stock visibility would have seen SKUs, which could have resulted in better planning from your sales teams to be proactive with customers to prevent cancellations and find a new timeline when items will be in stock.

Slower Fulfilment & Customer Dissatisfaction

With the rise of fast shipping and delivery in the B2C and DTC world, B2B buyers expect a level of convenience and speed. Slower fulfilment leads to customer dissatisfaction. Any delays in order processing that are out of the norm lead to a poor customer experience. Customers begin to question your reliability if poor communication and slow fulfilment happen often. 

Increased Administrative Costs

Poor management hurts your business by increasing administrative costs across your teams. If you're processing orders manually, you're going to spend more time double-checking product availability. 

Administrative costs go up if you don't have an efficient workflow with automated systems that allow you to check inventory levels throughout the day and adjust pricing. By automating repetitive tasks, you free up your team's bandwidth. 

For example, it's inefficient to spend hours a day going back and forth between spreadsheets, emails, and accounting software to check orders, update payment statuses, and communicate with your operations team. Tasks like these could be automated, which allows your team more time on revenue-generating activities such as customer retention, customer relationship management, or upselling.

Poor order management directly affects your revenue, customer retention, and efficiency. Any gaps that go unaddressed, customers begin to question your reliability, and you risk losing customers to your competitors.

Best Practices for Streamlining Order Taking Processes

By automating order taking with a CRM system and inventory integration, you have a visible view into fulfilling customer orders. Standardising and optimising your pricing is another best practice to make order taking efficient. Implementing a real-time stock update to prevent over-selling will ensure you achieve efficiency and customer satisfaction across your company.

Automate Order Taking with CRM & Inventory Integration

Automating order taking with a CRM and inventory integration streamlines the order taking process. Entering manual orders is a major source of inefficiency and leads to human errors. Automating this process ensures that every order flows through a system seamlessly from sales to fulfilment, and there is a constant stream of communication. 

Through an inventory integration, sales teams can access visibility into the inventory levels, SKUs, and product details. This includes a customer's order history and stock availability, all in one system. This will allow any orders entered through a sales team member to be automatically updated and pushed to the next level of fulfillment. 

Automation saves time, minimises errors, and allows your team to focus on relationship building and being proactive with customers.

Standardise & Optimise Your Pricing 

Streamlining your order taking process begins with transparent and consistent pricing. Clear and standardised pricing eliminates any guesswork and ensures your team knows the correct pricing to quote customers accurately. Inconsistent pricing causes delays and damages trust with customers due to a lack of transparency. 

Pricing can be automated through your CRM. Instead of manually referring to a spreadsheet or document, teams can generate quotes that reflect what the customer needs and what is in their contract if they are a long-term customer. This will speed up any quotes and order processing, reduce errors, and eliminate back-and-forth between teams. 

Implement Real-Time Stock Updates to Prevent Over-Selling

Implement real-time stock updates to streamline the order taking process. This helps prevent over-selling. Real-time stock visibility is essential to ensure teams are not over-promising without a set timeline, or under-delivering, or creating more backorders than your team can handle. 

A significant source of customer frustrations is placing an order, only to discover it’s out of stock. The same applies to the B2B world, where out-of-stock items are often passed down to other companies and, in turn, to consumers, depending on your industry. 

Utilising a CRM ensures your team can access live stock levels when creating orders and communicate with customers proactively. 

Leveraging Technology to Overcome Order Taking Challenges

Technology plays an important role in helping B2B companies modernise and streamline their order taking process and management. A CRM integration, automated workflows, and customer-specific pricing rules can all be used through technology to overcome order taking challenges.

CRM Integration

A CRM integration can serve as an operational system and backbone for sales teams that manage complex orders from B2B companies. Your CRM should integrate with your inventory so it’s viewable across teams. 

Your CRM should also serve as an ERP and accounting system. It should be a hub where sales teams can access data on inventory and customers, product information, availability, pricing, and past orders. 

A CRM can help overcome order taking challenges by allowing team members to work in the platform and have everything streamlined in one platform. A centralised hub minimises errors, ensures data accuracy, and keeps every team on the same page.

Automated Workflows

Automation will solve B2B order taking challenges because it reduces friction in any order processing. Automated workflows can automate tasks, trigger communications at each step in the sales and fulfilment process, and streamline communications. Automation can save hours of admin work and ensure tasks don't fall through and are taken care of.

You can automate by:

• Generating order confirmations and submissions.
• Sending low-stock alerts to appropriate teams.
• Communicating with team members when customers haven't placed an order.
• Communicating when customers are churning.
• Communicating approval when needed for pricing.

Customer-Specific Pricing Rules

B2B pricing can vary depending on the type of contract a company has with you. It could also depend on any discount tiers a customer has or seasonal offers. Managing all these pricing manually can lead to inaccurate data and errors that can be costly. This can lead to slow quote generation and pricing errors with key customers.

Utilising technology to streamline this order taking through a CRM, you can have pricing rules automated that can help your team automate and generate accurate pricing when needed in record time. Your pricing rule can be applied based on the account, order size, and type of contract you have, and ensure that any pricing delays are not an issue. 

Key Metrics to Track for Better Order Taking Performance

Track these key metrics for a better order taking performance: 

• Order Accuracy Rate - Measures the percentage of orders fulfilled without any errors. A high rate will indicate a reliable and solid process with minimal rework needed.
• Average Order Processing Time - This tracks the time it takes from the point of receiving an order to processing it for fulfilment. A shorter times reflect a better workflow. 
• Stock Availability Rate - Measures the percentage of time items are in stock when orders are placed.
• First-Time Order Completion Rate - Measures how many orders are completed without needing a second look or corrections.
• Order Fill Rate - This measures the percentage of orders fulfilled on the first shipment. This reflects the accuracy and fulfilment capabilities. 
• Number of Order Revisions - Measures how often orders needed to be revised or corrected.
• Customer Retention Rate - Measures how many customers are returning to place additional orders with you. High customer retention rates indicate high customer satisfaction. 

Simplify Your Order Taking with Prospect CRM

Leverage order taking software to overcome B2B order taking challenges with Prospect CRM. Prospect CRM offers full visibility into your customer data by automating key processes by integrating your product, accounting, and customer sales data in one platform. All designed to overcome B2B order taking challenges and maximise efficiency in your wholesale and distribution orders. 

Sign up for our 14-day free trial and discover how Prospect CRM features can drive efficiency and streamline your revenue for your business.