How Sales Efficiency Differentiates You from Other Flooring Suppliers

 

 

 

In the global flooring marketplace, how do your customers tell you apart from the competition? Unless you can stand out in the industry, you can’t attract new customers, and you’ll have trouble keeping your existing customers.

 

Along with this worry, you have other business challenges to overcome, such as:

 

1. Your sales team spends nearly two-thirds of its time devoted to non-sales activities, like paperwork and administrative duties.

 

2. Your business faces competition not only from local flooring suppliers but also from overseas competitors and online competition from large retail websites.

 

3. There are always outside economic pressures, such as cyclical ups and downs in the building industry, sluggish economies, or other world tensions.

 

 

While there are big ways to make a splash in the industry—such as introducing a never-seen-before product—there are many other ways to differentiate your business that don’t require a big investment of time and money. In fact, there are things you can do this week that will start paying off almost immediately. Incorporate these five techniques into your operations to differentiate and stand out from your competition, so you can help your existing customers and attract new customers to your flooring supply business.

 

 

1. Have an online business presence.

 

It’s no longer optional: you must have a robust online presence to stay competitive in business today. Studies show that at least 70% of B2B buyers research online before they ever talk to a sales representative. Yet, not all manufacturers have a functional website that lets customers do that research. If they have a site at all, it often just points customers to their physical address and phone number.

 

Your customers want to research your products and find some of the answers to their questions. If they can’t get the information they want from you online, they are likely to look elsewhere for the flooring products they need.

 

You don’t need to spend a lot of time and money building your own elaborate eCommerce site to take care of your customers online. You can be up and running in a short time by joining an online marketplace and listing your flooring products there. Listing your flooring products in an online marketplace gives you a few advantages, like giving you exposure to new customers and making it easier to expand into new territories. By displaying your products online, it’s easier to compete with online competitors.

 

You can also opt to sell your flooring products through an online dealer. When you do this, the dealer handles sales and customer service, while operating their own eCommerce site. You provide the product, get wider exposure to more customers in the market, and can still control pricing and distribution.

 

 

2. Use sales automation to improve your customers’ ordering process.

 

Sales automation provides a benefit for your customers. Your customers want a way to save time and be more efficient in their own business processes and are more likely to work with suppliers that offer sales automation than ones who don’t. By having a smooth, online process to request information and quotes, and start purchase orders, your customers will save time on their research and start the purchase process easily.

 

Sales automation provides an additional benefit to your own business. On average, your sales team spends almost two-thirds of its time doing something other than selling your product. What if they could reclaim some of that time, and spend more of it on their sales calls? The way to give them extra time in the day is to make their jobs easier with technology. Streamline your paperwork and make the process more efficient with B2B sales automation tools.

 

 

3. Follow up with leads and build relationships.

 

With pressure from large online operations and foreign competition, anything you can do to build a relationship with your leads and customers will give you an advantage in the flooring industry. Large companies like Amazon won’t spend the time to nurture leads and provide customer service and useful content.

 

As a smaller company, however, you can provide the personal touch that your customers want. And a robust customer relationship management tool (CRM) makes your nurturing and follow up activities even easier. With a CRM, your sales team has the ability to monitor opportunities, track all conversations with leads, keep notes, and be able to share them with all members of the sales team. They can send mass emails and email newsletters to prospects and stay in contact with them.

 

As your leads grow, you’ll want to tailor your message to different groups. Using online networking sites, you will have contact with industry professionals like architects and designers, contractors, and property managers from outside your local geographical area. A CRM designed for the building materials industry lets you create your own custom mailing lists and send tailored messages to different customers.

 

A CRM lets you send individual messages, like a birthday message or a greeting card to a long-term customer or business partner. This type of personal touch in your business communication gives you a competitive edge with your clients and leads.

 

 

4. Work with your resellers to make their businesses easier.

 

Online sales automation makes it easier for your resellers to place their orders. Streamlining the order process makes it easier for resellers to order inventory on a just-in-time basis, cutting down on their warehousing needs and being able to respond to their customers faster.

 

Sales automation technology will also help you better serve your resellers when they want to create their own private label flooring products from your stock. With the information already online, resellers can rename a flooring collection with a minimum of effort.

 

 

5. Help your partners save money.

 

Another benefit of the improved ordering efficiency with sales automation is that you can save a significant amount of money for your customers. Just-in-time replenishment can reduce the need for warehouse space and free up your customer’s capital. Or they can go a step further and eliminate the need to store products altogether, by using dropshipping. Fast online order processing and dropshipping your product from your facility directly to the retail customer lets your distributors save time and money, bolstering their business and giving them the incentive to continue working with you. This is also a great way to attract new customers that want to resell but don’t have the space or budget to store inventory.

 

 

The Right Tech Tool for the Job

 

Sales efficiency will help you get new customers and retain the ones you have. The question now is, what kind of technology do you need to do all of this?

 

That’s where Vogueboard can help. Our cloud-based platform is designed specifically for the building products industry. It has everything you need integrated into a single platform, including sales automation, a comprehensive CRM, an online marketplace, and networking.

 

Designed with your business in mind, it’s easy and intuitive to use. Your sales team can streamline the selling process, giving them more time to work with more customers and handle smaller orders.

 

Best of all, you can get started at any time. It takes less than an hour to set up your account.

 

Let Vogueboard show you how we can help your business. Click here to set up your free live platform demonstration.