7 Best Practices To Get Your Retailer To Order Himself

What did one cyclone tell another cyclone?

I have my eye on you.

Don’t blame us for starting with a joke. We needed that pick-me-up after the dreary news that we have been waking up to this week. 

The first thing about best practices to get your retailer to self-order is to roll out our Retailer App.

Second, by digitizing your retailers expect to create a larger impact on your business. We’ll discuss it in detail in next week’s newsletter. So watch out for it. Meanwhile, if you still need some convincing, watch our case study on how the Retailer App impacted Bausch & Lomb’s business in India.

The story of how the Bizom Retailer App brought about a digital revolution for the retailers of Bausch & Lomb India. What the app did was enable B&L’s retailers to order directly from the brand. It was a simple switch. But one with enormous gains for the brand.

7 Best Practices to Get Your Retailer to Order Himself

More and more consumer brands are digitizing their supply chains, and retailers are beginning to adopt the new tech. While there was some resistance before the COVID-19 pandemic, today, all the stakeholders in the Indian retail industry know that the future belongs to digital. Still, don’t expect that just creating the self-ordering tech will automatically solve your demand-supply challenges.

Here are some quick and straightforward tips to increase Retailer App adoption among your retailer network.

1. Own your success: Just having great tech isn’t enough. You need to make it work for you. Start by evangelizing it to your internal audience. You must get a senior leader to sponsor the app. People will listen more and might even adopt the app in higher numbers.

2. Align sales organization to business development: You might be scratching your head about how to change your sales team so significantly when they are used to taking orders themselves. Start by changing the KPIs of the sales team. The new goals will have to be around app installs, first-time orders filled by the retailer on the app, repeat orders, etc. These are some foolproof methods to move your sales-order-taking rep moves into business development.

3. Incentivize retailers to change to the new model: Offer better servicing to retailers who order through the app as well as higher commissions. Given that the order-taking process is simplified, you’ll need to rearrange the commission structure between the stakeholders to reflect that change. Enable loyalty points for transactions on the app.

4. Improve distributor order fulfillment: This is crucial to get repeat orders on the app. Ensure that these orders get differential treatment and better fulfillment SLAs and fill rates than earlier.

5. Highlight your schemes: Focus on schemes of priority products that you need to drive on the app to ensure traction in the right direction.

6. Showcase product visuals: “Joh dikhega woh bikega” is the golden principle of retail. Similarly, for retailers to order from you, they would need the comfort of seeing product images on the app before ordering. Ensure quality, hi-res images for all your listed products. 

7. Communicate through notifications: In the past, you created posters, leaflets, and brochures to communicate schemes and products to retailers. However, the Retailer App enables 1to1 communication with your retailer network. Ensure retailers know of any new schemes and promotions through notifications. You can also send product communication videos to ensure they get all the info you want them to have. You can gamify this too with commissions for every notification read, video viewed, etc.

To know more, Book a demo of the Retailer App or write to us at marketing@bizom.com