Nowadays, B2B customers are looking for the most convenient, reliable, and personalised delivery service possible. It is becoming more & more common for customers to want an experience that is personal to their needs and preferences. This preference places a strain on delivery businesses & drivers, and having the right information at the right time has been difficult to achieve.
Routes may be planned inefficiently, drivers may not have the stocked items a customer wants, or may not have the information they need to promote items and sell more.
With the right data behind each customer, delivery drivers and van sales reps can make the most of route stops, helping your business to become a more profitable delivery operation.
So, how can you get the right information to your drivers so they can offer a better service and sell more?
We’ve covered a few different ways that digital delivery software can help your driver maximise sales while personalising the delivery service you offer to your customers.
To provide the products and delivery services that your customers desire, you must first have a system in place that allows you to collect data and track customer trends, preferences, and behaviors.
This could be how often customers place their orders and which products they regularly order. With a system that can track and organise these findings, you can begin to predict and forecast behaviour, helping you to plan demand, manage inventories, stock levels, and available resources more accurately.
Suggested sales orders are a powerful sales measure to cross-sell and up-sell your products, and ensure each customer gets personalised deliveries that encourage future sales.
The biggest obstacles to this goal are your van reps not having access to customer information at the point of delivery, and your backend team having a tough time planning it for them.
At the point of delivery, RouteMagic prompts drivers with customer-specific items based on historic sales records. Drivers can encourage up-sells, as customers tend to respond quickly and positively to on-the-spot recommendations.
Customers can get the products they need and the service they want, while drivers can sell more and drive profits for the delivery business.
Are your inventories based on guesswork and mismatches with real life customer demand? Load suggestions can help your drivers load their vans with products that they are likely to sell that day.
Digital systems can take customer buying habits, trends, and preferences and use this data to ease order management and drive efficient delivery execution and customer service. When drivers and reps load their vehicles at the start of the day, they get prompts on products and quantities that they need to load to make the most of each day’s call schedule. This optimises the use of your inventories, reduces wastage, and boosts your sales opportunities for each delivery. This eliminates the guesswork from the delivery plan, making the best use of available resources. Delivery apps can take it a step further, adjusting stock levels accordingly while drivers deliver and shares this information with the main system - meaning no manual record keeping and accurate stock levels at all times.
Creating a picklist includes stock calculations and customer buying insights that drivers can’t have. which means customers are not getting their preferred products, causing you lost sales.
Digital stock management systems like RouteMagic collect data on each of your customers, their purchasing habits, their preferences, products, quantities, and so on, and then suggest these to your reps when they are submitting picklists for the following days, or weeks. Our system makes suggestions on picklists, prompts your reps or drivers with products that each customer usually purchases, and ensures that they have the right information they need to accurately forecast and manage future demand.
This is the second in a series of articles based on optimising van sales performance, which aims to show you how you can improve van sales management with RouteMagic’s technical prowess, for business growth.
Once your reps or drivers are empowered to make the right deliveries with no calculation mistakes or mismatch of items being uploaded or distributed, the next step is to focus on maximising each sale that they are going to make.
RouteMagic has been around for over 20 years now, providing solutions for a range of industries, sectors, and business models. We support over 100 customers and thousands of daily users, continuously improving our software to alleviate a range of challenges.
