As Forbes points out, “Sales software and sales leaders seem to have a love-hate relationship: The software loves sales leaders, but sales leaders hate the software.” In an industry where sales managers and reps are looking for an edge to stay ahead in a highly competitive environment, technology can make a difference.
Pacific Coast Supply (PCS), a subsidiary of Pacific Coast Building Products, faced a common problem: they needed a software upgrade. Though functional, the complexity of their legacy system made it difficult for the organization, which has 50 locations across 12 states, to quickly bring new personnel up to speed.
As the 70-year-old company expanded, it struggled to enter new markets because it took too long to train customer-facing employees. It took as long as six months to train a new employee, and employee turnover can be high in this industry. How could they free up time for training and get branch employees up to speed faster?
One thing that stood in their way was a traditional order management system.
Order management refers to everything from receiving and tracking orders to managing the processes required to fulfill an order, delivery, and customer service follow-up. For retailers, this includes inventory visibility, ordering, picking, packing, shipping, and returns.
Distributors typically face many challenges with their order management systems. Outdated technology lacks integration and scalability, creating manual workflows and redundant tasks that hold back distributors looking to grow. Working with existing systems is not enough. The problem is, the way companies manage orders impacts customer service and ultimately customer retention.
So if a merchant can’t onboard new hires to their order management system quickly enough, it will negatively impact the customer experience.
A further challenge for PCS was that competitors were able to open new stores much faster.
Management considered building new order management software from scratch, but the cost and time involved would be prohibitive. As the company’s CIO, Marty Menard, put it, “Traditionally, software has been built because nothing existed. Today, buying rather than building is a better approach.”
On average, the learning curve for their legacy system was four to six months. When PCS upgraded to their order management solution, they reduced onboarding time to just four days. By automating manual processes, they reduced delays, reduced errors and inventory by 30%, and increased gross margins by 1%.
Menard shared an important lesson.
- The speed at which software is deployed directly impacts your bottom line.
- Software upgrades must be tied to a significant, clearly communicated ROI, or your organization’s appetite for change will be undermined.
- To increase adoption rates, choose software with an easy-to-use interface.
With the right solution, training time is reduced and ROI is realized more quickly because team members can immediately focus on what matters: their customers, rather than struggling with new technology.
That’s really the point of this story: Sales and customer service teams believe that their technology tools are getting in the way of what they really want to do: sell to and support customers.
When companies modernize their technology and streamline their sales and ordering processes, they free their sales teams from the yoke of complex systems and processes and free up time to spend with customers — making them a true extension of the customer organization and valuable partners to the business.
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