Wondering how your wholesale company can increase sales or attract new customers? While growing your business is never a perfect science, there are certainly some tried and true strategies for how to get wholesale clients that can boost your bottom line.
In this article, we’ll reveal how to get more wholesale customers and how to increase sales in the wholesale business. Read on to learn 6 potential strategies for building your wholesale customer base, and which may be right for your business.
1. Beat your best price—and advertise it
When it comes to buying wholesale, many customers are looking for one thing: value. And if you’re in a position to offer a better price, selling your wholesale inventory at a discount might just move the needle.
But simply lowering your prices incrementally isn’t the only step. After all, your customers might not even notice that you’ve dropped a few cents off the wholesale unit price. And new customers won’t know they’re getting the best price if you don’t announce it.
Call or email your customers and personally let them know that you’re beating your best price on the items they order frequently. You’ll also want to let new customers know about the value you’re offering by proving you’ve got the lowest prices in town. (Comparing your price list to their current provider’s is always a good tactic.)
Remember, you don’t need to reduce the wholesale price of every item in your warehouse. Instead, you can pick and choose where to offer discounts, perhaps cutting the wholesale price on a handful of things you know many of your customers want to buy.
To protect your bottom line, you can consider offering these discounts only if customers buy a certain number of cases. However you decide to beat your best price, advertise it!
Related: How to Calculate Your Wholesale Price
2. Learn how your customers choose new suppliers
When it comes to attracting new wholesale customers, you may want to put yourself in your potential customers’ shoes. After all, most companies are pretty selective when choosing new suppliers.
One thing is certain: if potential customers haven’t heard of your business, they cannot buy wholesale from you. Ensure your company has an online presence, consider attending trade shows, and look into paid search campaigns that can help potential customers find you faster.
Once new customers begin vetting your business, ensure the process is easy on them. Understand what benefits you offer your customers—location, reliability, value—and articulate those benefits during the vetting process.
3. Improve your entire customer experience
Another thing you’ll want to pitch to new wholesale clients is a seamless customer experience. Streamline the end-to-end process: ordering, communication, delivery, invoicing, and on. To attract new and discerning customers, you’ll need to optimize every touchpoint of your buyer-seller relationship.
Of course, an “ideal customer experience” can mean different things to different customers. If you’ve got some customers who still want to place orders over the phone, accept orders that way. And if you’ve got customers who want to handle every transaction via email or through an online portal, have that available as well.
You can also automate your own technology—like switching to premium inventory management software—to optimize your processes internally. By getting your own wholesale inventory organized, you’ll be able to help your customers with their needs, questions, and orders more swiftly.
4. Recommend top-selling or related products
To encourage your wholesale customers to add new items to your orders, try offering personalized recommendations on other products.
The best place to start? Review what they order most, then find other customers who order those items, too. What else are those lookalike customers ordering? Once you know, you can begin making smart recommendations to your customers.
You can also reach out to your customers and learn more about their businesses. For example, if a buyer is local, consider making an appointment to stop by and chat with your person of contact. By educating yourself about your customers, their processes, and their inventory needs, you can make informed recommendations that are genuinely helpful.
5. Incentivize both existing and new customers
There are all sorts of incentives you can offer both new and established customers to increase sales or secure a first-time order. Here are some ideas:
For new and established customers, volume discounts can help both buyers and sellers increase profits. As a seller, you’ll move more inventory faster, reducing your overhead and risk of obsolescence while getting cash now. And your customers, so long as they have a place to store the inventory, can pay less per unit for products they already know they need.
You can also offer discounts or rewards for new customer referrals. Of course, the value of this discount or reward will vary based on the kind of business you do. Choose an incentive that’s attractive for potential referrers (but also allows you to meet your margins) to ensure your referral program actually generates referrals.
6. Reduce your minimum order quantity (MOQ)
Your minimum order quantity is the absolute smallest amount of product your business will sell to a customer. If you can swing it, lowering your MOQ can help you tap into a new customer base.
Of course, not all companies can justify lowering their MOQ. You’ve set this minimum based on what makes sense for your business. Still, if there are enough new customers out there, you might be able to justify lowering this number.
If you cannot reduce your MOQ, you could consider storing inventory for some buyers. That way, they’re still buying the minimum, but you’re delivering the order to them over time.
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About Sortly
Sortly is top-rated inventory management software designed to make every aspect of managing your wholesale inventory a breeze.
With Sortly, you can create a visual inventory of everything you’ve got on hand, keep track of key details like cost price and wholesale price, and set low stock alerts for inventory levels to ensure you re-order the right amount at the right time. Plus, you’ll save tons of time, money, and stress with powerful automation features like barcode and QR code scanning, reorder notifications, and customizable reports perfect for auditing and accounting.
Best of all, getting organized with Sortly will help you stay organized in real life—improving both operations at your business and the customer experience you offer both new and established wholesale customers. Interested? Claim your free, two-week trial of Sortly today!
