Put Your Fulfillment Program in the Fast Lane with an Online Ordering and Inventory Management System

Published On September 27, 2017

In business, ‘time is money.’ Being slow to respond to leads and other opportunities can be extremely costly to your company. Because a prospect’s interest in your product is highest at the time of inquiry, the faster you respond, the better your chances of moving that prospect along in your sales pipeline. An online ordering and inventory management system is the ticket for your fulfillment program to ride the fast lane.

Online ordering can speed delivery of sales support materials when efficiency really counts – for example, when sales reps are meeting with prospects or customers. With a few clicks on their laptop or tablet, reps can place an order for delivery by mail – or even download materials immediately – before the meeting wraps up.

Additional Benefits of Online Systems

Online systems also help your fulfillment program save money by enabling you to better track usage and costs by marketing channel, business unit or even individual sales representative. This data can help you quickly spot waste and take steps to reduce it. Say you have a sales office that always orders way too much literature and stockpiles it until it goes out-of-date and has to be thrown away. That’s the same as throwing away a portion of your budget.

An online system lets you place limits on the amount of literature an office or individual can order within a given time period. You can also charge back the costs of that literature to the sales office or individual sales representatives, giving them an incentive not to order more than they actually need.

Additionally, online systems capture data that helps you forecast how much of a given piece you’ll need in the future. That way, you won’t order more than your company can use before it becomes obsolete (saving money for storage and insurance, as well as wasted materials) or ordering too little (leading to out-of-stock situations and rush charges for backorders).

Finally, better systems – like Iron Mountain’s GroupTrak – offer tools to help with creation, customization, production and compliance-related tasks. For more on that topic, read our related article titled Still Not Using Online Fulfillment? What Are You Waiting For?

Bottom line:

• If it takes too long to get information into prospects’ hands,
• If it’s difficult and time-consuming to figure out who’s ordering what and how much, and
• If you’re ‘guesstimating’ reorder quantities,

you can solve these problems by switching to an online ordering and inventory management system.

If you’re not currently using online ordering – or if the online system you’re using doesn’t give you all the functionality you need – download our data sheet to learn about the advantages of Iron Mountain’s GroupTrak system. Would you like a no-obligation demonstration of GroupTrak; Click Here for an online demo.