The best phone system for wholesalers and B2B distributors

Your customer base is your best source of revenue: Skipcall turns it into a systematic calling campaign.

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Hundreds of companies use to make every call pay off

The situation

What holds you back today

01

Dormant accounts nobody has time to call back

02

Phone orders with no record of what was agreed

03

Uneven coverage of the ledger from one rep to the next

The answer

What Skipcall changes

Reactivation campaigns on segmented lists

The parallel dialer →

Every call recorded and summarised in the CRM

Recording and transcription →

A coverage dashboard by account manager

The parallel dialer →

Specific to your industry

The hours your customers actually answer

A wholesaler does not sell to offices. Your customers are tradespeople in vans, workshop supervisors on the shop floor and buyers with a narrow window for suppliers. Calling everybody at 10am means reaching only part of the ledger.

7am to 8:30am, tradespeople before they get to site

The day has not started, the customer is in the van and already knows what is short. The calls are quick and go straight to the reorder. Keep this window for accounts that buy regularly rather than for prospects, who have no reason to give you those minutes.

12 to 1:30, the break on site

A second window on the same people: work has stopped and the phone gets answered. This is the moment for accounts that never answer in the morning, and for the longer conversations about terms, a new range or opening an account.

9am to 11am, buyers and stock controllers

Purchasing and stock control work office hours and deal with their suppliers first thing. Avoid Monday morning, taken up with the week's planning, and Friday afternoon. With these people a booked phone appointment beats repeated cold calls.

4:30pm to 6:30pm, back from site

Tradespeople call in at the trade counter or head home and set up for the next day. It is the most useful window for chasing an open quote or an account that has not ordered for weeks, because tomorrow's question is already on their mind.

Dormant accounts answer at their own buying hour

A customer who always ordered on a Tuesday morning still answers on a Tuesday morning. Order history does not just give you the list to call, it gives you the slot. Sorting a reactivation campaign by usual buying day and hour moves the conversation rate before you have changed a word of the pitch.

The trade counter and the phone compete for the same people. Short calling sessions pinned to these windows fit a wholesaler's day far better than an open prospecting block running from morning to night.

The script

Calling an account that has stopped ordering

You are calling a customer who used to buy from you and has stopped pulling stock. At the other end is a tradesperson in a van, a workshop supervisor or a stores controller, not a buyer in a meeting. The job of the call is not to sell, it is to find out the real reason they stopped.

The opening

“Hello, [first name] from [company]. We were supplying your [product group] up to [month]. I am looking at your account and nothing has gone out since. I wanted to know what has changed at your end.”

Name the product group and the month of the last delivery. In one sentence the customer knows who is calling and why, and the conversation starts on their business rather than on yours.

If they say they found it cheaper elsewhere

“Fair enough. Which lines did you move? I am not going to re-quote you on the phone, I just want to know whether it was the price or the lead time that made the difference.”

The reason given is almost always price, the real reason is often a shortage or a delivery that went wrong. A discount handed over on a delivery problem does not bring the customer back.

If they say they do not need anything

“No problem. What sort of work are you on at the moment? I will tell you what we are holding in that group, so it is in your head when it comes up.”

If they pass you to somebody else

“Who triggers the reorder with you, is that you or the workshop? Give me their name and when they are about, and I will ring them direct instead of going through you every time.”

In a lot of accounts the owner signs but does not order. The useful person is the one who sees the gap on the shelf or on the bench.

If they say they will call you back

“I would rather we fixed a time. You used to order on a Tuesday morning: shall I ring you next Tuesday around 7:30, before you set off?”

Order history gives you the day and the hour as much as the list to call. Going back to their usual buying slot saves you a run of unanswered calls.

To close

“I will send that over in writing today and put it all on your account, so whoever picks up at the trade counter has the same history I have.”

At Skipcall, every call is recorded, transcribed and summarised, so the script gets corrected against what your reps actually say rather than what we imagine they say.

Avoid this

Three mistakes this industry makes on the phone

The mistake

Opening with “I am just reviewing your account”, with no reference and no date.

Do this instead

Name the product group they bought and the month of the last delivery. That is what separates a supplier's call from a sales call, and it is what keeps the tradesperson on the line.

The mistake

Asking for the owner when the reorder is triggered by the workshop supervisor or the stores controller.

Do this instead

Work out on the first call who sees the shortage and who places the order, then call that person direct. The owner agrees the terms, they do not order the consumables.

The mistake

Producing a discount to hold on to an account that says it is leaving.

Do this instead

Find the real reason first, price, lead time, a shortage or a delivery dispute, and only then talk terms. A reflex discount damages the margin on every order that follows without touching the cause.

A calendar full of meetings starts with a call.

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions, Wholesale & B2B distribution

A wholesaler's need is not that of a team working a cold list: most of the revenue comes from an existing customer base. Look first at whether the tool can work from lists drawn out of your own data, whether it keeps a usable record of each conversation, and whether it writes into your CRM without double entry. Skipcall dials four lines in parallel, records, transcribes and summarises every call, and integrates natively with HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce and Attio, other tools going through the API. The deciding factor is still your ability to segment accounts before you call.
Start by deciding what dormant means for you, which depends on your reorder cycle: three months without an order means one thing on consumables and quite another on equipment. Then segment by date of last order and product group, and call each account back in the slot it used to order in. Give the call a specific reason, a line back in stock, a new reference, a price change, rather than a catch-up. Always record why they stopped buying: that is what tells you whether the account is lost or only paused.
Yes, business to business marketing calls are allowed. What you cannot do is call a company number registered with the Corporate Telephone Preference Service, or a number on the TPS, which covers sole traders and ordinary partnerships, and the screening has to be repeated as registrations change. Anyone who asks not to be called goes on your suppression list straight away. UK GDPR still applies to the named individuals on the account: a documented lawful basis, a privacy notice, and a notice at the start of the call if you record it. Ringing an account that already buys from you is customer contact, not marketing.
The order itself goes into your ERP, no phone system replaces that. What is usually missing is the record of everything around it: the discount agreed, the delivery date promised, the substitute reference accepted. A call recorded, transcribed and summarised against the account record makes that memory available to the next rep and to whoever handles the dispute. Tell people you are recording at the start of the call, which is not optional.
The two answer different needs and sit together well. The trade counter number takes incoming calls with no named recipient, with a menu and a queue. An individual line serves the ongoing relationship: the customer rings back the person they spoke to. Skipcall is the second case. It receives calls on the line of the person they are for but does not distribute them, with no voice menu and no queue, so you keep your existing switchboard for reception.

Other industries that prospect by phone

See all 25 industries →

Automotive & Dealerships

Every enquiry you fail to call back is a sale someone else makes: Skipcall turns the call back and the follow up into a routine.

Office Equipment & Print

Appointment setting at volume: take a rep from 60 to 200 calls a day.

Accountancy Practices

Chasing eighty clients for their records should not cost a member of staff a whole day: Skipcall turns it into one session.

See what it does on your own lists

A demo runs on your own contacts, not on a sample data set.

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