Web presence will take on greater importance for wholesalers

BY RICH SCHMITT

Business management specialist

As I have said in previous columns, most wholesalers’ business is being conducted through traditional channels --   outside sales, inside sales and the counter. Most wholesalers have a very small percentage of their bu-siness flowing through their website and electronic order entry tools. 

As we talk with wholesalers we still have not found a wholesaler who is electronically selling more than 12% of their total business to trade customers. I am sure that there are exceptions to this statement but, thus far, we have not had anyone provide verifiable numbers to us. That is the most we have encountered and the typical numbers we hear are below 5%. With all this said as background: I believe that today’s wholesalers must have a viable web presence. 

Following are several quick reasons for your consideration:

• It is a part of the services package that the well-rounded wholesaler provides to trade customers. If you want to be a trade customer’s primary supplier (first call, first stop, last look) you need to provide for that customer’s current and future needs. For some the web is a current need and for others it is a future need, but few customers will say it is not on their radar. (For a reprint about becoming the Primary Suppler to your customers, e-mail me at rich@go-spi.com.)
• A web order entry system allows trade customers to shop and order when your locations are closed. Some contractors work early in the morning, some work into the evening and some burn their candle at both ends. Whatever their work habits, the wholesaler’s website is there to serve customers 24/7.
• Some of the most progressive contractors are interested in using technology to help them operate more efficiently and to better manage and control their business. Many, but certainly not all, of these forward-thinking contractors are desirable customers for the wholesaler. (Contractors who are good business people can be demanding customers, but well-run businesses are often more viable over the long term.)
• The national wholesalers and large regionals have or are developing electronic tools as a way to differentiate themselves from their smaller independent wholesale competitors. Their plan is to disqualify smaller wholesalers in the process.
• Large government, industrial and institutional customers often demand that their suppliers provide electronic tools as a condition of doing business. I see this trend increasing and I see them demanding more services and functionality over the coming years.
• Some business is being taken out of your community by internet suppliers located outside your community, your state and maybe even this country. If it is easy to order from you and your prices are fair you may be able to recapture some of this business.
• Many times your cost of processing an electronic order will be less than using traditional sales approaches.

Now I’ll share some thoughts about your website and web order entry.

Many wholesalers have the mistaken idea that their website and electronic tools should be the responsibility of the information technologies (it) team because they involve a computer. Of course the it team should be involved in any implementation, but they are often not the right group to assess the customer’s needs and to create the best marketing tools for the situation. 

Most programmers have never been to a contractor’s shop, most programmers have never had a serious conversation with a contractor and some have never even met a contractor. When you live in an isolated high-tech world it is easy to start believing that everyone has a high level of technical proficiency, that everyone has a high-speed communications line into the shop and home, and that they value some of the high-tech bells and whistles that techies love. It is the marketing team’s job to understand the customers and to develop traditional and high-tech marketing programs that speak to those customers. I have seen instances over the years where the best leading-edge technical solution (often the most interesting to the technical team) is not the right solution for the trade customer. 

The website and electronic marketing tools are not some new-fangled way to think. Tried-and-true common sense marketing rules should be applied to your website and any other electronic tools. That should be comforting to the less-technical marketing pros.

In other words, if you look at your website and it seems difficult to use, your customers will probably find your site hard to use. You must not let that tech-guy dismiss your view saying, “You just don’t understand” or “It’s a technical issue.”

You probably chose your software vendor because they helped you to manage your business.  You probably gave very little thought to how that vendor created solutions for your customers. Your objective is to provide “best in class” tools to your customers. The primary question in determining “best in class” is:  “What does the customer need and want?” Ideally that is what your software vendor is providing but that is not always the case.

Further, while the web order entry solution provided by your erp software vendor might be more integrated with your software, that integration doesn’t matter if your customers won’t use your website. Again it is the marketing team’s job to really understand the needs of your target customers and to insure that all marketing tools (from low-tech to high-tech) are appropriate for the audience. Ideally, your marketing tools are the best in your market.

You can provide a lot of features on your website but if it is not fast and easy, they will not like it. We feel that a plumber ought to be able to use your website with less than 15 minutes of training by his assigned salesperson. 

Every member of the wholesaler’s team, who has customer contact, should be proficient in using the tools you provide to the customers

This starts with your sales team. I think training ought to be done by the customer’s assigned salesperson for several  reasons:

• The salesperson knows the customer and is less likely to offend him in the process. I have seen tech-oriented trainers talk down to trade customers over the years and you must not let that occur.
• The salesperson can observe how his customers use the system and provide ongoing feedback about its operation to the marketing team. This feedback is vital to the ongoing improvement of your marketing tools.
• The sales team can help to debug and make the system trade-friendly while they are learning and demonstrating the system.  They can often see when a product has the wrong picture or needs more information to be truly helpful to the customer.
• If the system is too complex for your sales team, it is too complex for your customers. 
• When your team are experts in the using the system they will promote it to customers and help to make it a success.  (I have heard stories where the customer asked his salesperson if web order entry was available and the salesperson actually said that he wouldn’t use that piece of garbage. I think some of it was ignorance about the web and the rest was fear of losing control of the account. Neither are in the wholesaler’s best interest since the account might be lost to a competitor whose system isn’t a piece of garbage.)

I find it surprising that I can get onto the internet and find just about anything that I want but cannot search for an ell, a fitting, a black tee or a copper elbow on a wholesaler’s website. I think you will find that a surprising number of trade customers want to try your website but are quickly discouraged by their initial experience. They cannot find products using the common words they use to order the product so after a couple tries they give up. They are embarrassed to call you and ask for help in using your system so they just stop using it. 

Some of the worst sites require that the contractor learn the wholesalers’ product keywords or, even worse, know the six-digit item number for a product. In some cases this is a software limitation which means the software cannot make the process easier due to poor design. In other cases, the software is adequate but the data that was loaded into the system is not trade-friendly.

Many wholesalers feed the data directly from their main computer system into their web software. When the data in the main computer is inconsistently formatted and uses all sorts of screwy abbreviations it is almost impossible to use. Some wholesalers say, “Well our internal folks can use it so the customers should be able to use it also.”  In many cases, I would respond, “You pay your people to tolerate the goofy data and so they do. Some customers will also tolerate it if you pay them too but it would be better to just make your system trade-friendly.”

Many wholesalers create a compromise website simultaneously trying to attract and serve multiple types of customers. The most common website compromise that I have seen in our industry involves a single site for trade customers and showroom customers. To me it seems a little like trying to create a combination fast-food and gourmet restaurant. The tastes and needs of the two target customer groups are vastly different.  If you think about it for about two seconds you realize that trade customers want a fast and easy way to plan jobs, then to select and order products. Some also like managing their accounts online. 

I think the showroom site should be designed to create traffic into your showroom. For most situations, you won’t even have an order-entry feature since those sales are so consultative in nature. The showroom customers want to experience your design style. You want to demonstrate that you have the brands and the experience that they need. They need to be convinced that your showroom consultants can guide them through the myriad of decisions and issues associated with creating that world-class kitchen or luxurious inviting spa in their home. Every compromise that you make in the process results in a lesser experience for one of the customer groups. 

Further, if you are attempting to sell products to retail customers across the world, a third site is probably warranted.  If you sell to many types of trades (plumbers, electricians, hvac contractors, etc.), you may serve each group more effectively by creating separate trade-focused sites for each trade.

Just like you are trying to earn the role of primary supplier (first call, first stop, last look) with your trade customers.  Ideally, you want your site to be your trade customers’ home page. At a recent seminar I asked for suggestions on how to accomplish this and one attendee suggested putting pornography on the site. Obviously, he was kidding. Well I think he was kidding.

In any case, I think putting other useful content, short of porn, on your site might be appropriate. For example, why not have the local weather available on your site or local sports and news. The idea is to create a site that the trade customer visits daily or multiple times a day. As I surveyed wholesaler sites in this industry, I found only a couple that seemed to really be up-to-date. Most had not been updated in months and years.  (Why would a contractor want to go to a site that had last been updated in 2005?)

It is easy and inexpensive (even free) to imbed software in each page of your site to determine how the customer got to the page, which search terms were used to attempt to locate a product and whether the customer ever found and ordered the product. The idea is to constantly measure and improve your sites’ usability.

A big percentage of all visits to websites come directly through search engines. Even if a trade customer knows the link to your site, he might be using Google to find you so it is important that you construct your site to be searchable and to be displayed at the top of the first page of the search list. It is critical that your site rank well in Google.com since they are the dominant search engine. (In the range of 62 % of all searches are done through Google.com.) 

Another big chunk comes from Yahoo.com. Prospective showroom or retail customers will find you primarily through search engines with a very small percentage probably coming from manufacturer’s links to your site.

Insist that your people use your site

Every pc in your business should have your site as its default home page.  (As opposed to aol.com, msn.com or babes.com.) Your team will instantly know if your site is not operational. (I was talking with a wholesaler whose site was down for over a week before anyone found it. His people didn’t notice it and none of his customers took the time to call about it. They discovered the situation when they reviewed the weekly sales report and found that their normally low number of web orders had gone to zero.)

While I will continue this topic next month, I do want to give you the best news of all, good websites and good web order entry systems do not have to cost an arm and a leg. Your marketing assignment is to take a hard look at your site and your web order entry and determine whether it is current, accurate and really serves your target customers. If not, start the process of fixing the problems so you can deserve to be the home page for those target customers.