Increasing your Wholesale Sales — A How-To Guide
Wholesalers make their money not by selling products to the public, but by selling products to retailers. While this may seem obvious enough, this different from B2C to B2B has an array of challenges and advantages that are specific to the wholesale model. A bit like supply chain models such as dropshipping, wholesale relies on a combination of B2C marketing, wholesale specific deals and superior customer service to increase sales and maximise profits while providing a smooth experience for their retail clients.
Marketing Strategy as a Wholesaler
As touched on before, wholesalers need to specifically focus on a much smaller set of clients — their retailers — as opposed to the wider public. This should inform their marketing strategy. There’s a lot of flexibility in the forms this may take; some wholesalers’ markets work in the physical world of trade fairs, newspaper ads etc while some others are incredibly online focussed. Whatever path they choose, it’s key to create targeted marketing for the retailer clientele in order to attract new clients and reinforce existing ones. As with many other businesses, marketing in wholesale is broadly about understanding your market and then seeing what it lacks — and creating market materials towards it. Creating clients out of leads and leads out of interest is what a wholesale marketing strategy involves.
Wholesale-specific Deals
Wholesale has a simple advantage over other supply chain methods that has always been evident — the price. Because wholesale operators can acquire products in bulk, they tend to pay a lower price which is then passed on to the retailers. Following this line of thinking, wholesale deals tend to include a sort of quantity guarantee in exchange for lower prices. Indeed, retailers may even get discounts for entire product types — Chesterfield sofas, high backed chairs or butterfly dining tables — as long as they order a certain quantity of them. Other types of deals may include holiday discounts, lowered or free shipping and a first-time order discount to get customers through the door.T These deals, and the corresponding prices, are wholesale specific and are key to increasing sales in this competitive, e-commerce world of the 21st century.
Superior Customer Service
Wholesale can often be a business model with few differentiating factors within an industry. Aside from product variations, they all offer some sort of wholesale deals, welcome offer and a plethora of other benefits. Thus it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd unless the wholesaler makes that extra effort, and this is where the idea of superior customer service comes in. Not only is it a distinguishing factor that ensures a more satisfied clientele, it also helps with client retention. Importantly, wholesalers deal with fewer customers as a rule — they’re dealing with retailers, not the public, after all. Thus, it’s more important than usual to keep their small clientele happy, because a single unsatisfied client can have a significant impact on their bottom lines.
