I had a dear customer respond quickly to my post of yesterday with questions and suggestions. I am transposing them here, much paraphrased to protect the innocent, with my answers below each:
Q: What are ways us regular remainder buyers can improve the quality of the titles we get access to?
A: You might be subtly alluding to the fact that I have terrible organizational skills and lose the thread often, leaving you wondering whatever happened to old Ben Archer. But when I send you my lists, and I promise to send them to you more often, I really am sending you everything I can find. To fine tune to the extent that the big remainder buyers see better lists than small remainder buyers would be so conterproductive as to cause our sales to decrease as we spend time figuring out what to show who and when. And the big buyers that compete with you for inventory, meaning the largest indies and used bookstores, not Safeway or Dollar General, want exactly what you want, 90% of the time. However, all that being said, sales reps almost always send the most info, lists, "good stuff," nudges, etc., to customers who respond. It hard to send lists, deals, and announcements week after week, month after month, to a "customer" who never, or almost never, responds. I have very few customers, count 'em on one hand, who respond immediately to 75% of what I send them, and, yes, guilty as charged, they do get my attention. I'm sure most of what I am writing here applies to other reps. It's human nature. (Dear customer: I hope it is obvious that I am NOT talking about YOU!)
Think of your customers, walking into your bookstore. Some come in almost every day. They may not buy anything most days, but you get to know them. You think of them when you order books. You call them when something comes in that you know they would want.
Access Tip: The biggest buyers, and lots of smaller ones as well, visit our warehouse. Some visit once a year, some once per month, some visit for a few days at a time, some a few hours, but that is the best way to get the best books. You can't just show up, we need to set up appointments, but start talking to me about it now, and we can make it happen.
Q: How can I get a better rate of fulfillment?
A: You can order immediately, you can order on our site (well, all right, that might actually be a bit better), call ahead to reserve inventory, you can cajole, berate, plead, and harass, you won't get 100% fill on anything but a handful of orders. Some might be 95%, but 100% is the holy grail. Sometimes books are damaged out after we receive your order. Sometimes our receiving process glitches and we did not get what we thought we got. We have over 30,000 titles here, but about 10,000 of those are available in quantities under 10 and you don't see them on our lists for the simple reason that the fill rate on those is so low. (Tell me if you want to see such a list and I'll send it to you, as long as you consider yourself forewarned.) If all you cared about was fill rate (like the chains), you would only order from lists where the available quantities were high, say, 100 minimum. You can ask me for that, too, but you won't buy much. I know others might have better fill rates, but we have the best books in the industry, so it's a trade off worth making.
Going back to those few hyper-responsive customers, they have the same fill rates as everybody else, but they order the same title over and over, whenever they see it on a list, until they get it.
This customer also had a suggestion, for me to create a "Pro Tips" page, which I will do, just need to give it a little thought. While most readers of this blog are pros, I am not, so will need some more suggestions to get that project done.
Thank you for being a bookseller!!!
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