3 Bottlenecks That Are Limiting Your Growth Potential

You’ve gone as far as you can.

Sales have either plateaued, declined, or you have an opposite problem: it’s so crazy you can’t keep up.

At this point in your promotional products biz, you’ve won by smarts, sheer tenacity, and people power (everytime there’s a problem, you throw people at the problem). 

But now, you’ve hit the wall. People power is expensive and hard to scale (and just adds more complexity). You and your team are busy from sunup to sundown. At best, you hope to hold on. Keep clients happy. All while managing the sanity of your team under extremely tight deadlines and complex orders. 

Ironically, we think we can overcome problems with more activity, despite the obvious logic that we can’t sell our way to efficiency. Most distributors make the fatal mistake of thinking that if they just do more, they’ll fix all their problems: Add more clients. Add more support. 

But the “add + add + add” mentality simply adds to the fundamental problem: bottlenecks. 

BTW: We all know what a bottleneck is but for a distributor it’s deadly because bottlenecks mean traffic jams and traffic jams mean slow work. And clients, projects, and orders are not getting slower but faster. Bottlenecks are your enemy. 

Because of bottlenecks, you and your team will hit the wall again, and again.

Here’s a shocking answer to the problem:

DO LESS.

One of the surprising secrets we’ve learned after working with over 800 distributors is how they’ve been able to do more with less. In a recent survey we asked a question about priority, which topic was most important to promo pros. Sales? Marketing? Social media? Culture?

The #1 response was not landing a new customer, nor how to do marketing better, it was:

“Help me scale my business.” 

Bottlenecks are due to three problems:

1. Your lack of a simple, fast process: Maybe you’re using spreadsheet-based purchase orders and project management tools. Or, you have too many systems: From artwork management to estimates to sales orders to purchase orders to Slack to CRM, shops, (and more!), your multiple systems are not a well-oiled machine that makes you fast as but clunky Frankenstein (a system built by bolt-on parts) that communicates poorly, gets cranky, and moves s-l-o-w-l-y.
2. Duplicate (triplicate!) data entry: Maybe you have too many hand-offs with your team, leading to duplication of efforts. Double data entry from quote to order. Double data entry from order to invoice. 
3. Inconsistent protocols: Too many different people doing the same thing (sales & orders) but in different ways. No streamlined process. You can’t duplicate success because you can’t scale dozens of methods at once. You have no center of gravity, and no way to replicate the best method.

These kinds of problems make you feel powerless. 

Out of control. 

As if there’s nothing to be done but to persevere.

But you can gain control over the problem and scale your business because there is something you can do, and it’s much easier than you think.

Your fix for easier processes that lead to growth is in a simplified, superspeed engine. 

Right now, if you were to count the number of hand-offs per order or the number of systems you use to operate your business, you’d be shocked. Take out a sheet of paper and do a quick drawing, note the number of people that touch an order from ideation to estimate to order to receivables. Note the number of systems you use to manage it. Note which parts of the process are duplicated. Note how many hand-offs per project. Note how many different communication points you have (Slack, text, email).

Here’s how to scale and increase productivity by 40%:

Ryan McAlister, Director of Pro at distributor Purpose Built Pro put it this way.

First and foremost, commonsku has helped us with efficiency. In the past, we would use multiple systems of record. We would touch items multiple times. So we would be using one system for an estimate, and then we'd have to recreate it when we'd created a purchase order to get the items from the vendor. And then we'd recreate it when we had to send the bill to the customer. 

It's a rough number, but we probably increased productivity about 40 percent just by switching  the sales aspect of commonsku. But also what's important to us is like how we present ourselves to our customers. So, our presentation, whether it's the consistency between an estimate all the way through an invoice, our ability to add product images and have just accurate descriptions on all those different types of documents is just tenfold improved with commonsku.

Your problem is not to add more + more + more, it’s to do less, less less. 

Gain back speed and control by removing your bottlenecks.

And simply your work so you can empower your sales team to elevate the client experience. 

We’re here to make it easy.  

Join us for our growth webinar and interview with Dominque Volker, VP Sales at Whitestone!