In product fulfillment, there are a lot of jobs. Stocking and delivering products; canvassing for new clients; handling client complaints, supplier issues, and international shipping matters—you get the idea. In fact, you’ve probably been involved in them.
Clients love people who can provide great product fulfillment services with top professionalism. But when the services are affected by a company not focusing their efforts in the right places, that’s when a reassessment of their operations needs to be done. When you find yourself working every which way with no sense of organization, there is a problem.
The problem with not channeling your product fulfillment efforts in the right place is obvious: you lose money by not keeping an eye on what you should be working on. This often happens to product fulfillment types—they think they can cover all the bases of their duties by themselves or only feel comfortable working on a specific area and as a result neglect other areas. But you can’t let this happen too much because then all of your hard work will never quite manifest into the significant rewards.
Product fulfillment is a client-based business, and your efforts have to cover your clients’ needs outright. You have to provide your clients with the right services and then keep them happy. But in addition to that, you have to make sure you have a high conversion rate for yourself so that you are generating profits by providing product fulfillment services. When the profits aren’t happening, you have to take a long, hard look at your operations and be ready to make some changes.
Getting out the Books
It seems to me that the best, yet most painful, way to see how well you are doing in product fulfillment is to examine your financial records in great detail. That is the only effective way you will be able to see if what you are doing is literally paying off—if it isn’t, then you have to effect change.
The first thing you have to examine is your sales force. You are likely constantly devising ways to create good sales material to properly attract clients to your business and persuade them to buy up products from your product line. But here is the big question: Is what you are putting into your sales and marketing campaign(s) really generating the interest you want? Your records from conversion rates of sales from these campaigns and how much revenue you are bringing in will tell you the answer.
Aside from the above, there’s the matter of doing the whole quality vs. quantity of leads assessment. You’ve probably amassed a good number of clients and have leads that are piquing interest in your product. That’s all fine, but some of these leads are more interesting than others. It never hurts to start putting your leads into categories of client-account-value. Some clients might fit in the higher end of priority scale because they are regular buyers, while others are only occasional buyers and so are closer to the lower end of the scale. None of this means that you have to rate clients from “bad” to “good”; it just means that it’s a good idea to prioritize which ones might be more regular buyers and then offer those clients the more hands-on services out of their regular patronage.
Assessment, Evaluation, and Redirection
You’ve had a look at all of your clients, all of your leads, and your entire product fulfillment services. You’ve started to get a feel for what is necessary to make your product fulfillment business more efficient. Now it’s time to act.
Completing this rather cumbersome process means that you can start to tighten the screws of your business even more and redirect your efforts into the right areas so that you can operate your business better. Keeping good account-value information on hand and good software to catalog it all will help. Product fulfillment is a business that requires you to prioritize your work; but once you start doing it, you will begin to see the significant rewards happen for you.
Need solutions to your product fulfillment problems? APS Fulfillment, Inc has the knowledge and services to make your direct mail and product fulfillment ventures more successful. Contact APS Fulfillment, Inc by e-mail at [email protected], visit its web site at www.apsfulfillment.com, or call (954) 582-7450.
