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Originally Posted On: Key reports for wholesale business success | QuickBooks (intuit.com)
You’ve recognized the need for a data-informed strategy for your wholesale business, but what do you do with all the data you’re collecting? How do you use data to measure the success of your sales, order fulfillment, shipping, profitability, and so on? If you’re unsure of how to take full advantage of this information, this guide can help.
We’ve collated some of the key wholesale reports you can and should be using to monitor your business’s performance over time. We’ve also included ways that QuickBooks Commerce can help you keep track of these reports. Keep reading to identify what valuable reports you can gather for your business, or use the links below to navigate the post.
Sales over time by customer
Building strong relationships with retailers is critical for wholesale e-commerce businesses, as merchant wholesalers tend to have a smaller but more regular customer base. By looking at your sales over a given time frame and breaking it down by customer, you can pinpoint your highest-value buyers. These will be individuals who you might choose to offer a higher level of service. You can also identify opportunities to convert small, long-term buyers into more valuable customers by implementing initiatives like minimum order quantities (MOQs).
To view your sales over time by customer in QuickBooks Commerce, head over to your QuickBooks Commerce dashboard and click the Intelligence tab. From there, you can click Sales by Customer to set your desired time frame and generate a report.
Ship to promise
One of the biggest indicators of customer satisfaction and the efficacy of your shipping strategy is ship to promise. Ship to promise is a measure of how quickly an order is fulfilled after being made. Quick and efficient shipping is imperative to the satisfaction of your customers. This is especially true for customers who rely on wholesale goods for resale at their own businesses.
Don’t let inefficient shipping processes come between you and your customers. If you’ve integrated your shipping provider with QuickBooks Commerce, you can easily analyze the time between ordering and fulfillment from an easy-to-read and accessible dashboard. This will allow you to see where your fulfillment team can improve to provide customers a faster delivery experience.
Sales representative performance
Having a high-performing sales team is crucial to the success of any wholesale business and is a powerful economic indicator. That said, there are more ways to evaluate their performance than with the number of successful or failed sales. To track performance, you need to know the details that lead to these sales and evaluate them closely.
You can use QuickBooks Commerce’s sales history report to review your history. With QuickBooks Commerce, you can filter report results to view all sales representatives, assignees, or other related personnel. This can help you track how individual members are performing and provide rewards to top employees to incentivize a higher standard of performance across the board. On a higher level, this metric can also be compared to your revenue goals to evaluate the quality of your leads. By doing so, you can see whether you’re targeting the right audience and adjust accordingly.
Product performance
Tracking product performance helps you identify the best-selling products as well as the low sellers. Having this insight enables you to better optimize inventory, make informed marketing and purchasing decisions, and mitigate the risk of dead stock and stockouts. The last thing you want is to have to deal with old inventory or unhappy customers. You can also begin forecasting and planning for the future with this information.
Keep in mind that individual product sales can fluctuate because of a number of factors, such as:
- Seasonal sales periods
- Product discounts
- Promotional pricing
- Effective marketing strategies
- Trends on social media
It’s important to use sales and inventory forecasting to account for these fluctuations. Use QuickBooks Commerce to track wholesale inventories and sales, and create revenue predictions all in one place. To track wholesale sales by product in QuickBooks Commerce, go to the Intelligence section of your dashboard and click on Sales by Product. Then, you’ll select a date range and generate a report.
Sales cycle length
Sales cycle length is the time it takes a salesperson to close a deal divided by the total number of deals made within that period. It’s also another way of answering the question, “How long did it take to close the deal?” The shorter the sales cycle, the more time your sales team has to nurture new leads and work on generating more sales. Ideally, you want this number to decrease over time or remain steady.
With QuickBooks commerce, you can filter sales reports by time period so that you can see the sales made for the previous month, week, or day. You can also do this for multiple channels to ensure your sales team is shortening the sales cycle length across the board.
Use reports to their full potential
Collecting data is a meaningless activity if you don’t know how to analyze it, organize it into reports, and identify key insights. The right reports will make it easy to set benchmarks and track your performance over time. With QuickBooks Commerce, you gain access to valuable reports in real time so that your wholesale business is one step ahead of the competition. Additionally, generating these reports with QuickBooks Commerce can be done with just a few clicks. Start using data-driven reports to their full potential today.
For more key metrics to track, check our guide on financial reports for business owners.