Every order should land in one place. Not a rep’s phone, not my personal email, not a sticky note by the kettle. One shared orders inbox that somebody checks first thing every morning. Sounds too basic to write about, I know. It’s still the first thing I’d fix at any distributor, before new software and before new staff.
Any tool that reads orders for you, Botowski included, only reads what someone forwards or hands to it. Orders scattered across phones and folders never get that far.
I once gave every big buyer their own inbox
Early on, I thought I was being clever. Each of our five biggest buyers got their own address and their own folder, so nothing from them could ever get buried under everyone else’s mail. I colour-coded the folders and felt very organised for about three weeks.
Then nobody knew where to look. Whoever was covering checked the main inbox and assumed that was everything. A new buyer at one of those customers emailed the wrong address entirely. And one Friday afternoon an order dropped into a folder nobody opened until Monday, which is how I learned that a very tidy system can still miss a restaurant’s weekend delivery. More addresses just means more places to forget. I merged them all back into one before the month was out.
One address, and buyers who actually use it
Pick one address for orders and make it obvious. Something like orders@ at your own domain works, and boring is the point: a buyer guessing your order address should guess right.
Make it a shared inbox, not one person’s mailbox with a forwarding rule bolted on. Most email programs let several people work from the same mailbox, whether they call it a shared mailbox, a group or a team inbox. Give at least two people access. Holidays happen. So do sick days. When the only person who can see the orders is off, the orders are off too.
Getting buyers onto it is the harder part, and a stern email to your whole customer list won’t do it.
What works is slow and polite. Put the address on every invoice, delivery note and price list you send. When an order comes in somewhere else, reply from the shared address, so it lands in the buyer’s contacts next time they hit reply. Ask your reps to mention it once, face to face, not in a memo. Most of our buyers switched within a couple of months without anyone telling them they had to.
Some never will. Fine. The goal is every order in the right inbox, however it got there.
Texts, voicemails and a rep’s personal email
Orders still arrive by text, by voicemail, by a photo of a handwritten list, by a rep forwarding something from his personal email late at night. None of that is wrong (see why here).
The rule on our desk: if an order reaches you anywhere except the shared inbox, it goes there before anything else happens to it. Texts get screenshotted and emailed in. Phone orders get typed into a short email to the inbox while the caller is still on the line.
No exceptions, my mum included. She phones my personal mobile with orders for her friend’s café because, as far as she’s concerned, it’s quicker than emailing. Quicker for her. I put her on speaker and type the order into an email to the desk inbox while she talks, so the café’s oat milk goes through exactly the same checks as a supermarket pallet. Mum can hear the keys clacking and tells me I’m being ridiculous. She’s not entirely wrong, but she isn’t getting special treatment either.
Name it, file it, leave it alone
Filing rules only work if they’re dull enough to follow half asleep. Ours fit on a sticky note.
Every order gets tagged with the customer’s name, or labelled, or categorised, depending on your email program, and moves to a Done folder once it’s entered. Unclear ones get flagged and stay put in the main inbox until someone answers. Nothing gets deleted, ever, because the day a buyer swears they ordered six cases, you’ll want that email.
An orders inbox that’s empty by lunch means every order from the morning rush is either entered or waiting on a question somebody already asked. That’s the whole test.
Worth it even if you never automate a thing
The payoff comes before any software does. A buyer rang me once, certain we’d lost his order, and I had it open before he’d finished explaining: tagged with his name, sitting in the Done folder, booked for exactly the day he’d asked for. It was the wrong day, he just hadn’t noticed. And if you later want help, whether that’s software or just a clearer way of turning a buyer’s purchase order into a sales order without retyping it, the hard part is already done.
An order nobody can find might as well never have been sent.