For multi-site accounts with several buyers, it's often your ordering process, not your price, that decides whether you qualify and whether you keep them.
Price and a good relationship will get you a conversation. With bigger customers, that's usually as far as they get you on their own.
Which isn't to say price doesn't matter. Of course it does, and so do your range, your service and your stock. But once a customer gets past a certain size, they hit a problem none of those things solve: how do you let several people, across several sites, order from you without losing track of who's spending what? Price doesn't answer that. Whether your ordering process can carry it does.
It isn't turnover. A £50 million customer buying through one person, on one set of terms, can be simple to deal with. A far smaller facilities company with 25 sites, its own regional managers and its own rules about who's allowed to spend what is the harder one to serve well.
So forget the size of the cheque. The accounts that test you are the multi-buyer, controlled-spend ones: more than one person can place an order, spending runs on their rules rather than on trust, and prices or terms are set for their account rather than pulled off a standard list. Several sites, several buyers, their own approval rules, and a head office that needs to see the lot in one place. That's the shape that matters.
Picture it day to day, with none of this built into how you take orders.
Your customer is left with two poor options. Option one: force every order through one person, so somebody can check price, spend and authority every time. That person becomes the bottleneck for every branch and every buyer on the account. Off sick, on holiday, or just busy, and orders queue up or wait. Option two: let several people order, and rely on someone, on their side or yours, catching the problems afterwards. The wrong price applied. Someone spending more than they should. An order that went through without the sign-off it needed.
None of this is your customer being difficult. It's the choice a manual ordering process leaves them with.
Some larger customers put this in writing before they'll let you quote at all. The policy says any approved supplier has to support spending limits per branch or user, route bigger orders for sign-off, and show who ordered what. Some go further and require structured procurement integration, EDI or punchout, so their purchasing system connects straight to yours.
Plenty of multi-site customers will never ask for any of this. But where it's required, it isn't a feature you bolt on later. It's part of qualifying for the account in the first place, whatever your price, your range, or how long you've supplied them.
And even where nothing's written down, the same thing sways who a customer would rather deal with. Two suppliers, same price, same product: one leaves the customer's own people to manage all this by phone, the other applies the agreed rules inside the ordering process automatically. The second isn't winning on relationship, or on cost. It's winning because it makes the job easier for the people actually placing the orders.
Here's the part a lot of distributors get wrong. They think they've solved this because customers can place an order on their website. Often that just moves the same manual work somewhere else.
A site that lets someone order online, but can't apply the customer's own spending limits, approval rules or agreed prices, hasn't modernised anything. It's shifted the checking off the phone and into email threads, spreadsheets and internal approval-chasing.
The customer's staff try it once, find it doesn't work the way they're required to buy, and go straight back to phoning or emailing orders through. Usage stays low, the project looks like a failure, and the distributor draws the wrong lesson: not "we built the wrong thing," but "online ordering doesn't work for our customers."
For a bigger customer, that failed attempt is worse than never offering anything online. A customer who was never given the option doesn't know what you can't do. A customer who tried your site and found it more hassle has learned that lesson about you specifically. That one's hard to undo.
Getting the price and product right for that account. Every user sees the prices and range agreed for their account or site the moment they log in, not whatever a rep remembers to quote. The point that matters: this is governed by the same source data your own team works from, not maintained separately on a website someone has to remember to update.
Letting people order within their own limits. Spending limits sit wherever the customer needs them: per user, per branch, per cost centre, whatever matches how they run things. Orders above the limit get flagged for approval automatically, rather than left for someone to notice. That doesn't remove the need for sign-off. It does mean nobody's chasing a signature by phone, and everyone can see where an order actually stands.
Giving head office the full picture. Spend rolls up on its own, by branch, by user, however the customer needs to see it, so head office isn't waiting on someone to pull it together by hand. Every order carries a record of who placed it and who approved it, the same oversight the customer already expects of its own staff.
Connecting straight into their systems, where that's required. For some customers this needs to go further: their purchasing system talking directly to yours, through EDI or punchout, so an order placed on their side flows through without anyone re-keying it. Where that's genuinely required, it's a condition of qualifying for the account, not an optional extra. Where it isn't required, it's still one less bit of friction for the people ordering from you.
All of the above is written from the customer's side, because that's what decides whether you get the account. But it changes your side of the business too.
The real benefit isn't fewer phone calls. It's a lower cost to serve a more complex account. When prices, permissions and approvals are handled inside the ordering process itself, taking on more users or more sites doesn't mean taking on people to check, re-key and correct routine orders at the same rate.
In practice, routine orders move out of phone calls and email threads and into a route that checks account access, agreed prices, approval limits and order details before anything gets processed. Customer service spends less time reading prices back to people, chasing approvals, and correcting orders submitted under the wrong account, price or authority. Sales can take on more sites and more users without becoming the manual approval layer for all of them. And you can add users and sites to an account without adding headcount in direct proportion to the routine orders, which is usually the real constraint on taking on more accounts like this in the first place.
Worth being straight about the trade-off, though. Building this in isn't free, and it's slower to stand up than a plain order form. The honest comparison isn't portal versus no cost. It's the cost of building it properly against the cost of staying manual as the account grows, which is the one that keeps climbing.
Before pursuing a bigger account, run through a few questions first:
If the answers involve more than one buyer, an approval process, or a purchasing system of their own, then the way you take orders isn't an admin detail to sort out after you've won the business. It's part of whether you get the business, and part of whether you keep it.