Sales and distribution management plays a vital role in your business’s growth. More and more companies giving attention to their sales and distribution chain. By integrating these two-part into an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, many companies achieved profitable results.

Companies can reap a 25% increase in productivity, a 20% gain in space usage, and a 30% improvement in stock use efficiency if they use integrated order processing for their inventory system.

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As it’s becoming an industry norm, it’s best to know how you can improve your sales and distribution management from a single system.

In this blog, we are going to show you the importance of sales and distribution management, how an ERP system can help you grow your business by syncing sales and distribution, and existing solutions for this discipline. Keep reading –

What is Sales & Distribution Management

Sales management is the field of business, focused on the practical application of sales techniques and management of sales operations. Here are a few examples of sales management –

• Setting attainable sales goals
• CRM and pipeline management to nurture potential customers
• Forecasting future sales targets by analyzing present sales reports
• Creating effective plans and workflows for more sales
• Hiring and onboarding sales executives
• Training new methods and sales techniques
• Motivating and mentoring the sales team

Normally, a Sales Manager is responsible for overseeing the sales targets of the organization through effective planning and budgeting.

As for distribution management, this concept is more significant for businesses with physical stores/goods. Distribution management is a part of the marketing function and supply chain process that focuses on delivering products/services to customers. Here are some examples of distribution management –

• Overseeing the suppliers, manufacturers, and vendors
• Routine quality check of products/services
• Properly maintain inventory data
• Retain good relationships with manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers
• Create a smooth delivery system
• Check if the products/services delivered properly

As mentioned earlier, distribution management is more appropriate for businesses with physical goods. While that may be true, that doesn’t mean online goods don’t need proper distribution.

Importance of Sales and Distribution Management

When we see these 2 concepts individually, we might think they have no connection whatsoever. But in reality, both sales and distribution management are interconnected.

To put it more simply, if sales are not managed effectively, then the distribution channels are affected by that. And if distribution management is not done properly, it hampers the customer experience, which in turn affects the overall sales. Here are a few pointers on the importance of sales and distribution management –

1. Increased Efficiency

A well-managed sales & distribution system ensures that goods are delivered to the customers on time and in good condition. This helps the overall efficiency of the supply chain and customer experience

2. Reduced Costs

By optimizing the use of available resources, companies can achieve a reduced cost of customer acquisition and delivery process. This leads to more profit for the organization

3. Improved Customer Service

When you provide products and services to customers as per their requirements, that eventually leads to improved customer service. This, in turn, helps to build a good relationship with the customers. And good customer relationship helps increase brand loyalty

4. Enhanced Sales and Profits

An effective distribution and sales strategy help the company reach the target customer quickly and efficiently. This helps increase the overall profit and sales of companies

5. Better Inventory Management

Inventory or stock management can be a nightmare for many businesses. But if the distribution is done effectively by keeping accurate data, this leads to better inventory management.

Thus, we see that good sales and distribution management is important for a company to survive and grow in today’s competitive market. An effective strategy can help a company to gain a competitive advantage over its rivals.

How An ERP System Can Help with The Challenges of Sales & Distribution Management

As we mentioned above, sales and distribution management are interconnected. But they are completely different departments. Syncing 2 different departments’ work on time can be a big hassle even for the most competent managers. In addition to that, there are more challenges that they need to face.

Here are ways ERP can help solve the challenges of Sales & Distribution Management –

Integrated Business Procedures: In an ERP, all the business procedures follow a strict workflow, which is planned by management for effective communication.

Strategic Decision-making: When the flow of information is fluid across all departments within a company, that helps make effective decision-making.

Effective Inventory Management: With the help of an ERP, businesses can keep track of their inventory without needing extra time and money to check manually

Forecasting: ERP system comes with automatic report creation. With the help of those reports, decision makers can forecast many sales decisions like – demand creation, pricing strategy

Customer Management: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is included with ERP. Which makes keeping in touch with customers very easy.

Merging of Finance, HR, Sales: As the sales, finance, and HR team is connected to ERP for fluid communication, this helps the teams to take real-time and efficient sales decisions.

Single Reporting System: In an ERP system, the admin can get all kinds of reports in a single dashboard, which helps them to find or create reports at any time they want.

With an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, the managers can face these problems with an easy way to solve them. Moreover, an ERP system is developed to help departments within companies to communicate and be informed about their work. Which helps to be in sync.

Simplifying Sales & Distribution Management with WP ERP

There are many ERP systems available in the market. For Example – WP ERP, NetSuite, SAP Business One, QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise, SAP ERP, Oracle PeopleSoft, etc. But WP ERP tops all the other ERPs with its rich feature. Let’s check out how WP ERP helps simplify Sales & Distribution Management –

1. Store Important Information with Document Manager

For effective sales management, it’s important to keep track of what users want. Many times, sales executive needs to note down important information about potential customers. That’s where a document manager comes in handy. As for distributing, you might need to keep important files like NDA, contract deals with manufacturers in a safe place. With WP ERP’s Document Manager, you can store all these on our cloud server.

2. Organize & Manage All Your Deals

With the Deals extension of WP ERP, the managers can keep track, organize, and oversee all deals in a pipeline. With this, the team can see the deals in progress, activity progress that was set, the most recently won deals, and much more information from a single place. This helps the team takes effective decisions for better sales management.

3. Train Your Sales Department for Higher Productivity

One of the major parts of sales management is to train your sales team. To keep them motivated and train new techniques. With WP ERP, you will get an extension just for Training. You can assign new courses, and skill development tasks, and keep track of the progress of your employees.

4. Workflow Automation for Repeated Tasks

Manually doing every sales-related work can be a big hassle for employees. For example, sending a welcome email every time for a new customer can be a very time-consuming task. You can automate these tasks using the Workflow extension of WP ERP. It comes in handy for distribution management as well. Like – sending the invoice to suppliers or sellers after goods are delivered on time is now achievable with Workflow.

5. WooCommerce Integration

Many online businesses use WooCommerce to ease their business operations. To make sure the WooCommerce and ERP are in sync, WP ERP has the WooCommerce Integration extension. With this, You will be able to synchronize all your WooCommerce order details instantly with the click of a button. With the built-in CRM tab, you will be able to configure how your WooCommerce order data gets imported. Set the CRM sync on/off, the life stages of a customer according to their condition, and more. You can also set the owner for that contact. All these features make the work of the Sales Department easy and simple.

6. Supervise Your Inventory with Accuracy

Inventory Management is something that every distribution team has to handle. Keeping that in mind, WP ERP introduced an interactive inventory management system that seamlessly works with invoicing, stock, and many more.

7. Send SMS Notifications to Your Contacts & Employees

Being informed about every part of the sales and distribution process is one of the big roles to play if you are a manager. To make sure you know what’s happening with your clients, or notify suppliers about important messages, WP ERP has brought a system to reach your teammates and clients when emails and system messages are not enough. Send SMS notifications to your contacts and employees from your ERP system using famous SMS gateways available in WordPress.

Frequently Asked Questions about Sales And Distribution Management (FAQ)

Final Thoughts

The main goal of sales and distribution management is to achieve the target sales and grow the business.

Both of these departments have their challenges and scope for improvement. Only when you adapt and sync these two, you may get the best result for your company. Therefore, you need to make smart decisions to stay competitive and adaptive to the changes.

To make sure you have the best results, the sales force must be trained properly and motivated to achieve the desired results. The distribution network must be designed in such a way that it can reach the target customers efficiently. Take helps from each other and make use of all the resources available.