“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” – Mike Tyson
With the big fight now behind us, it’s fitting that our CEO borrowed this quote during a recent podcast with FulfillmentIQ. The same goes for SMB fulfillment in peak season — It’s the punch in the face every year.
Our latest Peak Season report with Industry Dive uncovered high confidence among supply chain leaders heading into Peak 2024, but that doesn’t match what we’re seeing.
SMB companies always suffer through gaps and return to the drawing board between January and March. They had tons of data to prepare. Still, trailers and trucks were not always positioned to make the holiday what it needed to be.
The winners of 2025 will be those who stop looking in the rearview mirror with their SMB fulfillment strategy. Plan with meaningful, timely data and guidance to get everything merged and working together nicely.
Anticipate your customers’ needs. Adapt to operational surprises. Take control of costs. Owning the health of your peak season takes confidence. That starts with solid planning.
#1: Peak season prep: drive the car forward
Start driving with your eyes on the road ahead. Learning from the past is important, but don’t live in it. The only way to escape this pattern is to get your real-time SMB fulfillment system tied into your front-end commerce system. This shows you:
- The real-time inventory picture
- One dashboard for many critical software solutions
- Early-warning alerts to disruptions
- Predictive forecasting based on this year’s demand
- Intelligent scenario planning
- Ability to shift stock where it’ll meet your promises without compromising your bottom line
Focus on outcomes
During the interview, FulfillmentIQ’s CEO Ninaad Acharya described an excellent technology partner as “Insurance – a CYA in the brand.” Business is cyclical. Most go live in summer, get frustrated in peak, look for someone in spring, and want to go live by late summer/early fall. But if two months go by with nothing but frustrations from your partner, that sets your business back. If you invest, you expect to double your business, not see incremental or small-scale outcomes.
When something’s too good to be true, it usually is. You’ll often hear, “enterprise visibility in under two months,” but the most misunderstood and value-eroding facts are often left out of the sales conversation.
Historically, good outcomes come down to good decisions and good people. It’s opening businesses up to what’s outside of the bubble they’re stuck in, both inside their operations and out.
The right WMS partner brings in that knowledge tailored to your goals rather than force-fitting you into prescribed, risk-laden functionality that has already reached its limitations. At that point, you’re just applying band-aids.
#2: Embrace hybridization (for 3PLs)
We’re seeing more hybridization in the middle market drive a massive spike in the adoption of cloud-based 3PL solutions, specifically those built for ecommerce as opposed to pure B2B. These give logistics companies a significant advantage over traditional platforms. You’re not stuck with a configuration for several years and then a massive upgrade. The technology always stays fresh and grows with you.
As 3PLs work with more brand customers, they’re not just serving a single, homogenous market. They represent 30, 50, or 300 clients with unique presentations and niche clientele.
See what 3PLs are currently doing to improve customer experiences and retention, despite rapid changes, volumes, and diverse client demands.
Brands expect adaptability from their 3PL partner. They need confidence that technology will solve every new challenge with the latest innovation. “How can I automate my pick/pack, EDI, etc., like I did ecommerce?” Hybridization is shifting these conversations for 3PLs.
A software partner that continuously addresses these conversations and provides a consultative resource is existential for 2025.
We’re co-creating an exciting growth engine for the 3PL industry. It’s exciting to see digital-to-consumer brands competing with traditional brands in omnichannel. Emerging winners will have a secret weapon: a technology partner that balances operations and margin protection with what is NOT changing:
- Consumers want service
- Consumers want speed
- Consumers want options
#3: Democratize your developer ecosystem
Operations are comprehensive – your North Star. This requires scaling 6-7 different software tools seamlessly. As an SMB or midmarket business, you don’t want to implement software, configure it, test it, or fiddle with parameters after the fact.
Once it’s up, you can’t run batch updates each night; that won’t be fast enough. Getting the outcomes requires getting help. Tie together systems and add services, and your operational problems will go away (fast).
You have your core systems gathering insights
Core platforms like Salesforce tell you what you need to do your actual job. You’re learning to market, personalize products, implement reward systems, and more. For example, you know that consumers:
- Want multichannel precision: 75% want a smooth and consistent experience no matter what channel they choose to interact with your brand.
- Expect excellent service: 80% prefer a good customer service experience that takes longer over a faster one. At the same time, 82% expect an immediate response to questions, and 59% have higher expectations for customer service than a year ago.
- Want value: 73% are changing their shopping habits. They seek value for the money, such as information on material quality and product description accuracy.
- Want convenience: When shopping online for consumables, consumers’ top priorities are convenience (74%), ease of use (48%), and speed (46%).
- Are disloyal: Post-pandemic, 75% tried new shopping behaviors and 39% of them deserted trusted brands for new ones. The good news: nearly 66% say they would become a loyal customer if a brand/retailer offered a more compelling shopping experience.
- Are buying on social media: 59% of marketers reported higher sales via social in 2023.
- Prefer personalization: Personalization programs yield up to 15% higher conversion rates and 20% higher customer satisfaction rates. In addition, 96% say a personalized offering increases the likelihood of a repeat customer, and 94% say a personalized experience increases sales.
Now democratize the developer platform
Technology and services should manage your operations so you can focus on marketing and serving your customers on another level.
Use AI best practices with a grain of salt
You’ll hear big enterprise software names say, “We use AI. This is best practice.” If you have to change your business to use the software, it’s not best practice!
AI is a prime example of an incredible amount of promise coupled with a lot of confusion and hesitancy about how it will be deployed. Learn where our customers are looking to AI to support their growth plans.
AI is real. It’s sexy to talk about, but it doesn’t need to be in your face all the time. It doesn’t even have to handle the work; it just directionally informs simple tasks and makes people’s lives easier for YOUR warehouse. That looks different for every business.
Don’t let traditional, old-school platforms oversell you on AI. The ‘best practice’ is democratizing meaningful information with a partner who brings tailored recommendations within the bigger picture and where you are relative to it. They must lead you down a forward path driven by your needs. Not by a buzzword created to sign a PO.
#3: Blend Supply Chain Planning + Execution
You commit to customers. You know your abilities, and you promised a date—no excuses. Ninaad shared an experience he had ordering Samsung headphones. The update email read, “Your order is on time.” Only, they snuck in a later arrival date as if he wouldn’t notice.
Once it has been noticed, the social contract is broken. You trust a company to keep its commitment. Trust is eroded – if not entirely gone forever – when they break it.
This enterprise brand used a generative AI solution for warehousing and distribution and an ERP suite’s flagship supply chain application for frontline workers. We’re in 2024. We shouldn’t have these problems. “It’s an absolute failure of planning!” Ninaad said.
To prevent these disappointments, everyone should sit down now with a business continuity plan that blends supply chain planning (SCP) and execution.
The applications that plan for inventory must work hand-in-hand with those that handle inventory. Discover a software strategy that unifies your supply chain planning and execution.
It’s anyone’s market
The real advantage here is to the aspirational SMB. With so many big businesses tied to rigid suites, long dev cycles, and perpetual consulting fees, it’s exciting to see mom-and-pop shops competing with big firms.
With a flexible SMB fulfillment system that can quickly tie execution into science-driven planning, brands are out-muscling big firms in moving the customer journey forward.
Do some scenario planning
Overselling is a dangerous threat. End-to-end planning + execution platforms that leverage scenario planning can break the destructive cycle of taking short-term revenue at the sacrifice of long-term reputation and profitability. In Ninaad’s case, the merchant should have never taken the order if their real-time SMB fulfillment system wasn’t hooked into their front-end ecommerce system.
Integrating SCP and execution has an immediate, positive impact on your long-term gain. Rather than relying on last year’s data, these tools help your business look at things like:
- Which items are ramping and will be needed 6 months out?
- If XYZ happens and this product takes off, we’ll do this…
- What’s the Likelihood-to-Cancel rate for an out-of-stock? Did you know we keep a Bell curve on this data by industry for 1-day, 2-day, etc.? At 7 days, order cancellation is 51%!
“If you can’t supply the order, why book the business?”
You spent money acquiring your customers; losing them to capture quick revenue is a dead-end game. The buyer might stick with you but if they don’t, you must consider the acquisition cost. If you’re lucky enough to have high brand loyalty and fail that customer, that’s disillusioning. They have infinite choices.
#4: Connect the dots, ensure your SMB’s brand promise
Digital has a prominent seat at the table. It makes the commitments, which it then kicks down to the logistics side or a 3PL. These units need to be joined at the hip. Everyone should have an instant view of potential bottlenecks.
Brand = PROMISE. Many big brands haven’t caught up to that yet.
The promise must be synthesized across everything you do, from manufacturing to retail to logistics. This approach gives nascent brands a massive advantage by ensuring no information disconnects.
Software companies are guilty, too
Don’t fall for it. Salespeople make a promise, but the Product or Implementation Teams fail to deliver. The promise made must be ONE promise aligned and delivered.
The network effect must also be considered in our digital, connected world. It’s not just the damage you have with that customer and their willingness to continue spending with you; it’s who they talk to. How many people will they tell about their bad experiences?
We often joke that there are only 2,000 supply chain professionals. A lot of our customers know each other; bad experiences spread quickly.
The hallmark of expertise is no longer how much you know. It’s how well you synthesize.
Information scarcity rewarded knowledge acquisition. Information abundance requires pattern recognition.
It’s not enough to collect facts. The future belongs to those who connect dots.
— Adam Grant (@AdamMGrant) October 9, 2024
“The future belongs to those who connect the dots.” Do your due diligence. Well said, Adam.
#5: Find a partner who fills a unique gap
Deposco was early to market with a unique SMB fulfillment platform developed natively on one codebase and one database. We solved the problem of disconnected systems that bury time-critical decision-making under manual work and never-ending technical debt.
We developed for brand-oriented SMB companies who understood their business but didn’t know how to efficiently manage inventory, pick, pack, or procure. They were losing margins with that seasonal punch-in-the-face because their partner wasn’t focused on outcomes.
We help our customers navigate new and complex SMB fulfillment requirements that are above their heads. They deserve guidance beyond empty sales talks, which often result in astronomic fees and the handover to consultants. We fill that gap, connect the dots, and provide a packaged solution that lets them do what they do best.
We have hundreds of successful engagements where companies went live in less than 90 days, got stakeholders aligned, and can adapt to change with fresh technology faster, easier, and cheaper. Let’s talk.