Initial situation
A leading distributor of industrial and electronic components considers itself a global omni-channel solutions partner for industrial customers and manufacturers involved in the design, manufacture or maintenance of equipment and facilities. With access to an unmatched selection of products and technologies – over 500,000 items – its customers can address any challenges with innovative solutions. This product diversity has brought the distributor a large number of smaller customers, whose requests now overload internal departments and cause long response times.
Solution
SALES UNIT sets up a sales support team responsible for both active and reactive support for small customers, thus relieving the distributor’s personnel resources. Active support, for example, revolves around placing special offers on certain product areas, which change every 14 days, actively targeting previous buyers in these segments by contacting the known customers by telephone and presenting the current offer there. During these conversations, customers can place orders right away or request order forms by e-mail. Incoming orders are immediately entered into the distributor’s ERP system by SALES UNIT’s team. Reactively, the sales support team provides relief by qualifying any
incoming e-mails and categorizing them into purchase orders, information requests, complaints and other topics. Depending on the content, these e- mails are either answered immediately by the sales support team, entered
into the distributor’s corresponding systems (ERP, CRM) or forwarded to the responsible departments. As part of this activity, expiring partnership agreements with customers are also updated. This comprehensive sales support relieves the distributor almost completely from workload relating to small customers, reducing it to only 25% of the original time required.