Getting your customers to actually use the portal
Buying the software is the easy half. The distributors who get adoption do four things, and none of them involve switching off the phone.
The most common way a trade portal fails is not that it breaks. It is that it works, and thirty percent of accounts use it, and the order desk carries on exactly as before while the subscription renews.
Adoption is not a marketing problem and it does not respond to an email announcing the new system. It responds to a small number of specific things, and they are all things you control.
1. Set up the first order for them
The single biggest predictor of whether an account uses a portal is whether their first visit shows them something useful or an empty screen with a search bar. An account whose order guide is already populated with what they buy will place an order. One that has to build the list themselves will close the tab and ring your rep.
You already have the data to do this: their order history. Populating a guide from the last few months of purchases takes minutes per account and it is the highest-return work in the whole rollout.
If your onboarding plan is a welcome email with a login link, it will underperform. The email should arrive after somebody has set their guide up, and it should say so.
2. Do not switch off the old channel
Every distributor is tempted, because running two channels is more work than one. It also does not work. Venues that feel forced resent the tool and find reasons it is wrong, and the ones who genuinely cannot use it, the elderly publican, the kitchen with no reliable signal, become open advocates against it.
Keep phone and email running for as long as it takes. Move accounts because the portal is easier, not because you closed the alternative. The channel closes itself when nobody is using it.
3. Move them in groups, with a reason
Do not roll out alphabetically. Start with accounts who have something to gain: the ones who order frequently, the ones who already ask for order confirmations in writing, the ones who complain about not knowing prices. They will succeed, and their success is what convinces the next group.
- A group small enough that one person can call all of them in a morning.
- Chosen because the portal solves something they have actually complained about.
- With their guides set up before the invitation goes out.
- Followed up by a human, once, about a week later.
4. Give the rep a reason to want it
Reps are often the quiet blocker, because being the order channel is job security. If they are measured on orders processed, they will keep processing orders. If they are measured on account growth and range penetration, the portal becomes the thing that frees them up to hit that number.
Change what you measure at the same time as you change the tool, or the tool loses.
What good looks like
Track the share of orders arriving through the portal, by account rather than in total, and look at the accounts that tried it once and stopped. That list is short, specific, and tells you more than any adoption percentage. Ring three of them and ask what happened. It is usually the same thing, and it is usually fixable.