A CRM for wholesale that manages accounts, not just deals

A wholesaler or distributor sells in two ways at once. There is the daily flow: regular customers ordering through a web shop, EDI, the phone or inside sales. That flow lives in the ERP, and that is where it belongs. And there is the commercial work around it: opening new accounts, extending the range at an existing customer, a project quote for a large delivery, next year's price agreements, and winning back customers who quietly started ordering less.

That second part often lives nowhere. The field rep keeps it in a notebook or in his head. Inside sales builds quotes in Excel or in the ERP and does not know what the rep promised the same customer last week. And the sales manager only sees at the end of the quarter, in the revenue figures, that a large customer bought half as much.

Here is a familiar case. A rep visits an installer with three branches. He hears that the customer asked a second supplier to quote on one product group. He writes it down, but the note never reaches inside sales. Two weeks later the same customer calls inside sales for a quote, gets the standard price, and orders from the competitor.

It rarely goes wrong on product knowledge. It goes wrong in the handover between field sales, inside sales and management.

Lumo is built for that commercial part. A customer is an organization with branches underneath, contacts and a timeline. Visits and calls are activities in one calendar. A project quote is a quote built from product lines on a deal. And a report shows which accounts need attention. Orders, prices and stock stay in the ERP.

Automations are rules that react to an event. A deal being created, changing stage, being won or lost. A new lead, person or organization. A completed activity. Or a deal or lead that has been stale for a number of days. The rule creates an activity or note, updates a field, assigns an owner or adds a label. It does not send email. A dry run shows what it would do first.

Rules wholesalers often use:

• Deal stale for seven days in Quote sent: create a call for inside sales.
• Organization created: assign it to the account manager for the territory.
• Visit completed: create a task Follow-up visit in 60 days.
• Deal lost with reason Price: add the label Price sensitive to the deal.

In reports you build the views a sales manager steers by. Quotes sent and won per account manager. Lost reasons per quarter. Visits per account manager per week, from the activities. And weighted pipeline per territory. Every chart drills down to the records behind it. CSV export works too, for anyone who wants to put it next to the ERP figures in Excel.

For product news and promotions you use email campaigns to a segment, for example all B customers in one territory, with an unsubscribe link and a consent check.

Say a wholesaler in installation materials with four branches. For this example we call it Technica Supply. It has 12 account managers in the field, 8 people in inside sales and one sales manager. Orders run through the web shop and the ERP.

Technica puts every customer into Lumo as an organization, with the ERP account number in a custom field. Chains get a parent organization with the branches underneath. Every organization has a segment A, B or C. A script from the internal IT team writes last year's revenue into the Revenue last year field every night through the API.

Each account manager plans visits in the Lumo calendar. Those who use Google Calendar see them there too. After a visit he completes the activity and writes a short note. A rule then creates a follow-up visit in 60 days. The visit frequency is fixed without anyone keeping a list.

Inside sales handles large quotes as deals in the Project quotes pipeline. A quote that sits seven days in Quote sent produces a call. Every Monday the sales manager looks at a dashboard with open quotes per account manager, lost reasons and last week's visits. He finds an A customer without a visit in the last 60 days through a saved filter. That is the conversation he has in the sales meeting, not last quarter's revenue.