by Serguey Shinder
Early in 2025 our trade site started receiving orders from one of our customers at odd hours, a few minutes after three in the morning, in clean batches. They were perfectly valid. What interested me was how they were chosen. On a product where a competitor showed a firm dispatch date and we did not, the order went to the competitor. On a product where our listed stock was higher, it came to us.
When we asked, the customer's buyer explained without embarrassment. They had put their routine purchasing through a piece of software that checked four suppliers each night against price, stock and lead time, and ordered from whoever looked best on paper. She approved exceptions. She had not visited our website in months.
I went and looked at our pages through that lens and it was not flattering. Our lead times said things like usually three to five working days, which a human buyer reads as three, a phone call and a bit of goodwill. Our stock showed in stock whenever the warehouse had any, including stock already reserved for other orders. Price breaks for larger quantities lived in a PDF. Most of the page, the photographs, the paragraphs about quality, the banner about our fortieth year, was addressed to a person who was no longer coming.
Everything that had quietly worked for us with humans stopped working with the software. A person forgives a vague lead time when you ring and apologise. A program that has been told three to five days and received the goods on day seven simply ranks you lower next time, and never tells you. We lost a noticeable share of that customer's routine orders before we understood why.
My expectation for the next decade is that a good deal of routine business buying goes this way, not because anybody decides it should but because nobody wants to spend their morning comparing the prices of screws. When it does, persuasion stops being what wins the order. Precision does. The supplier whose stated facts are specific, current and true gets the business, and the supplier whose facts are optimistic finds out slowly, from a falling line on a chart, with no complaint ever arriving to explain it.
We changed the facts before we changed anything else. Lead times became a date calculated from real warehouse capacity. Stock shown became stock available to promise. Price breaks moved onto the product itself in a form a program can read. Our sales team was sceptical, and then that customer's orders came back.
For forty years we sold to people who could be charmed and who would ring us when something was vague. Some of our customers now send something that does neither, and the only thing it has ever read of ours is whether what we said turned out to be true.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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