How To Reduce Friction In Your Sales Process

Friction is all the little hiccups and hurdles that impact and slow a customer’s progress through their ordering journey. Suppliers may not be able to avoid friction in sales altogether, but an achievable goal is to reduce it to the minimum amount possible. Aim to offer a “smooth sailing” experience to help customers order and pay for their stock and get to the end purchase as quickly and simply as possible. Here are a few things to focus on which will help get that right.  

1. Make responding to requests a priority

You can do this by staying on top of customer orders and following up straight away. This process is much easier if you utilise order management software and eliminate multi-channel ordering methods. .

If you want a single source of truth for all your order information, Kaddy can become your one-stop order hub. You will be alerted whenever a prospective customer requests to connect or an existing customer instantly places an order. You can manage all your customer orders in one place.

2. Remove traditional barriers like paper credit apps

You can do this by moving to online credit applications, but even they are time-consuming and can break the momentum of the sales cycle as customers have to fill out pages of details and then have to wait for approval. If you want to remove credit apps altogether, set up your brand on Kaddy, an online platform which enables customers to bypass the credit app process altogether. They’ll love you for it.  

3. Use a CRM to store your customer information

Use CRM (customer relationship management) software to manage all your customers in one place and send them marketing communications too. Most CRM have in-built tools, otherwise Mailchimp is easily manageable for small businesses as a marketing/email tool. Larger operations might find more robust solutions like HubSpot or Salesforce a better option, depending on business complexity and integration requirements.

Go one step further and use Kaddy to view each customer’s ordering history, and allow your customers to instantly place their orders. They don’t need to chase reps and can  avoid those onerous credit apps mentioned above.