Thousands of brands in the gift, home, furniture, toy, and apparel industries partner with sales agencies to reach independent retailers across North America. These brands benefit from the local knowledge, personal touch, and customer relationships that their agencies and salespeople deliver. This human factor contributes to success for brands and retailers alike – higher sell-through and higher re-order rates.
At the heart of the relationship between sales agencies, salespeople, and their brand partners is data. Having the right data, at the right time, allows each party to be more efficient and spend more time engaging with customers and adding value.
The security of this data is critical and requires safeguards to control who accesses it to ensure that it is utilized appropriately.
This seems easy enough to achieve… but let’s consider what is involved to make this happen.
A typical agency could carry over 100 brands, have over 50 salespeople and serve over 10,000 retailers. Each transaction involves a specific retailer, a specific brand, and a specific salesperson/agency. The data needs to flow quickly, accurately, and securely between these stakeholders.
Specifically, the following data is critical:
- Product details, pricing, images, and inventory levels
- Sales purchase orders with retailer details
- Purchase order and shipping status
- Payment method information (credit cards, ACH details)
Without up-to-date information on the thousands of products available from their brand partners, salespeople struggle to offer counsel to retailers and write successful orders. Without accurate customer bill-to and ship-to addresses, as well as PCI-compliant, tokenized payment details, brands struggle to accurately invoice, fulfill and charge orders. Without current inventory levels and order status data, agencies can’t keep retailers’ shelves fully stocked with the best available assortments.
MarketTime solves this data challenge. With 35 years of serving the entire wholesale ecosystem, MarketTime enables sales agencies, salespeople, and brands to spend more time growing their business, and less time worrying about how to get data securely from one place to another. MarketTime offers a range of value-added services built seamlessly into the platform. MarketTime works with brands to:
- Integrate source systems (e.g., Quickbooks, NetSuite, Sage, Shopify) to facilitate the flow of product, retailer, and order data.
- Tokenize credit cards from retailers and pass those tokens securely, and efficiently, directly into brands’ ERPs.
- Keep all ecosystem partners in sync on order and delivery status through a cloud-based integrated dashboard
MarketTime is proud to be the leading sales enablement tool in North America, facilitating over 4.5 million purchase orders per year for over 300k retailers generated by 350+ sales agencies, 7,000 salespeople, and 6,500 brands. With over $4B in annual order volume, MarketTime aspires to be the technology platform of choice for innovative B2B sales organizations across the world. At the center of this ambition, is a commitment to serve sales agencies and their brand partners. Stakeholders save time and money by providing an industry-leading set of solutions that make organizing and sharing information intuitive and secure.
Equipped with MarketTime technology, stakeholders have reduced the reliance on manual entry with advancements in digital order writing, digital order delivery, and secure credit card tokenization. Broader technology advancements, including cloud computing, powerful mobile devices, and application programming interfaces (APIs) have also been integrated into these solutions. The positive results of these advancements are evident for independent retailers across North America.
If your company is ready to work more efficiently and grow your wholesale business, the MarketTime team is excited to support your success.
About MarketTime
MarketTime’s solutions are the only fully integrated hybrid SaaS and cloud-based applications available to stakeholders anywhere and anytime that fulfill three key needs: making product discovery and ordering easier for retailers; making organizing and sharing information intuitive and secure for brands, and saving time and money for all ecosystem participants.
To learn more about how MarketTime can help grow your business, visit www.markettime.com or schedule a demo.
