Manufacturing Menu: Give your Marketing and Sales a Quality Boost with a Modern Dealer Portal

What is the secret of B2B marketing and sales in the digital age? Personalization and strong engagement with your dealers. This is achieved by having a good understanding of their needs and wishes and establishing powerful integration between all your communication and sales channels. Building and actively using a dealer portal is a great solution for manufacturing companies and B2B sellers to boost their marketing and sales activities.

But what can you do with a dealer portal? And what are the benefits?  We'll tell you in this article and show how the combined knowledge and experience of the companies within Emixa help in developing a modern, versatile and future-proof dealer platform.

About the Manufacturing Menu

The Manufacturing Menu focuses on all production phases and domains within manufacturing companies, with attention to specific challenges. It provides practical solutions to promote agility, innovation and adaptability through Mendix's low-code. In this blog post we delve deeper into the world of Marketing and Sales.

This blog is part of the series: "Manufacturing Menu: Practical Solutions for the Manufacturing Industry" If you are also interested in the benefits of smart warehousing and how it can improve processes in your warehouse and the logistics chain, we invite you to read this blog as well. Discover more here.

What does a Dealer Portal Offer? 

A dealer portal, often also called a dealer platform or B2B portal, is an online platform that provides dealers and distributors with access to important data. This includes relevant price and product information, ordering options, information about new products and ranges, service information, and an overview of payment options. A good dealer portal has the potential to become a key link in the often complex and challenging process of digital business.

The Benefits of a Dealer Portal

Using a dealer portal has several benefits. First of all, you get access to a wealth of data in one central location. Which products sell well? And in which regions and periods? You also get to see what each dealer is purchasing and better support dealers with the right data at the right time. With a good digital platform, dealers have the ability to work quickly and efficiently since all the information they need is available in one place.

A dealer portal also provides opportunities for setting up loyalty programs. These are a win-win for all parties involved: they help you create successful marketing and sales strategies and reward loyal suppliers with exclusive offers, products or services.

Another advantage of many modern, digital dealer portals is that they can be modularly expanded. Is your company and dealer network growing? Or do you want to quickly expand the portal with new features to better serve suppliers and end customers? With the right dealer portal, that's is no problem: the platform grows organically with the sales and marketing needs of you and your dealers.

With a CPQ (configure, price, quote) dealer portal, it is even possible to configure a product yourself, link a price to a specific product or service, and generate an accurate professional quote as an automated process. With a CPQ dealer portal, it becomes a lot easier to determine the price and exact functionalities of complex goods. Ideal if your product range is growing or if the products you make have a high complexity or diverse variants. Thanks to a good dealer portal with CPQ, you can easily generate leads and transfer orders to the production floor faster.

Customer Case Urban Arrow - Insight and Integration Thanks to a Brand-New Dealer Portal

 For Urban Arrow, a leading manufacturer of high-end e-cargo bikes, Emixa developed and built a brand-new dealer portal. To support its dealers in Europe, the United States and Canada, the bicycle manufacturer already had a dealer portal. However, it was outdated and limited in functionality, increasing the risk of errors and misunderstandings and limiting the functionality of the platform.  

The company therefore needed a new dealer platform to manage its enormous business growth and effectively support the increasing number of suppliers. This search led the bicycle company to the Mendix low-code platform. The flexibility of this platform ultimately made the difference. The IT department primarily needed a strong integration layer with flexible solutions, allowing the company to continue responding to changes in the market.

We built the dealer portal in twelve bi-weekly sprints. The portal ensures that sales from the dealer channel are processed administratively in the ERP system. In addition, thanks to the new portal, dealers gain more insight into product information, delivery times, suitable accessories and orders and invoices. Dealers can now change orders, add references, and see when an order is delayed. Thanks to the customer portal, dealers can better assist their customers, handle many things themselves, and manage expectations better.

The dealer portal integrates with ERP and PIM systems. Thanks to a personalized and intuitive design, the company logically involves dealers in the process without users needing to go through complicated manuals. The various data streams that combine payment information, customer data and orders are successfully connected in one integrated system. Read the entire customer case here.

Want to Benefit from a Modern Dealer Portal?

A modern and future-proof dealer portal allows you to strengthen your relationship with suppliers and give your marketing and sales a solid quality boost. Looking to enhance your dealer portal set up? Curious about how we leverage our knowledge of low-code, Mendix, digital twinning, plant simulation, and Siemens technology can help you with this? Feel free to contact us to explore the possibilities.