From fax and Excel to a B2B portal: the resistance is never technical

The fax is not the problem. It is the symptom of something that works.

We were once shown a fax machine in a wholesaler's office the way other companies show you their new logo — with slight embarrassment and a joke prepared in advance. Forty to sixty orders came through it every day. The managing director wanted it gone by Christmas. What nobody in that room said out loud is that the fax had a 100% adoption rate, needed no training, never had a password reset, and had not been down once in nineteen years.

That is the bar your portal has to clear, and it is much higher than the average project plan assumes. Your customer's warehouse foreman is not comparing your login screen to a competitor's login screen. He is comparing it to a piece of paper he has filled in every Tuesday for a decade, from memory, in ninety seconds, while on the phone. If the portal takes him four minutes, he will fax. He is not being difficult. He is being efficient.

Your best sales rep is the system, and he is not documented

Every wholesaler has one. He has been there twenty-two years, he knows that the customer in Hagen always orders the 4mm even when he writes 5mm, that the Tuesday order from the joinery is really the Wednesday delivery, and that one particular buyer gets a price that appears in no list because of something that happened in 2009. None of this is in the ERP. All of it is in his head, and when he takes two weeks off, orders quietly get worse.

When management says 'the reps are blocking the portal', this is usually what is really happening. It is not fear of technology and it is rarely fear of being replaced. It is that the portal, as specified, would take his correct order and process it literally — 5mm, as written, wrong, delivered, returned, and now the customer is annoyed at him. He is protecting the relationship from your software, and until your software is good enough to be trusted with the relationship, he is right to.

Automate the boring 70%, leave the interesting 30% alone

Look at a month of orders and sort them by how much thinking they required. In most wholesalers a large majority are repeats: the same customer, the same twelve articles, a different quantity. Those orders contain no sales value at all — nobody is being advised, nothing is being negotiated, a human is retyping a fax into a mask. That is the part to automate, and it is the part your reps will thank you for, because it is the part they hate.

The other pile is the reason your company still exists. A customer who needs to know whether the cheaper part will hold, a project quote across four suppliers, an emergency delivery negotiated at 16:40. Do not put that in a portal. Nobody wins when a self-service form tries to have a conversation. Give the rep better information — real stock, real dates, the customer's history on his screen while the phone is at his ear — and let him keep doing the thing that is worth his salary.

Why 'we will digitise everything' fails, every time

The all-in project has a seductive logic: do it once, do it properly, no half measures. In practice it means eighteen months of specification during which nothing ships, a catalogue of edge cases that grows faster than the team can close it, and a go-live where every single user meets every single new thing on the same morning. Then one price rule is wrong, the rumour goes around that the portal invoices incorrectly, and you have lost the room for two years.

The version that works is embarrassingly small. Pick the twenty customers who order the same things most often, give them a portal that does exactly one thing well — see my prices, reorder my list, see what is really in stock — and keep the fax line open the entire time. Do not switch it off to force adoption; that is a threat, and threats are how you find out how many customers your competitor can absorb. Turn it off when the fax volume has already fallen to nothing on its own.

• Ship in ten weeks to twenty friendly customers — not in eighteen months to all of them.
• Keep the fax and the phone open until they die of natural causes.
• Reorder-my-last-list beats a beautiful catalogue search, by a distance.
• One wrong price on day one costs you two years of trust. Test prices against real invoices.
• Pay the rep his commission on portal orders from his customers, or watch him route around it.

The only adoption metric that means anything

Not logins. Not registered accounts, which measure how good your sales team is at nagging. The number that matters is repeat orders placed without a human touching them, by customers who could have faxed instead and chose not to. If that number rises month over month, the portal is genuinely better than the paper and you can start widening. If it does not, no training programme will save you — the portal is worse than the fax at the thing the fax does, and you should go and find out why.

Corona did more for this project than any consultant did, by the way. When half the office was at home, the fax machine kept printing orders into an empty room, and everyone finally understood that the paper process depended on a person standing next to a device. That argument is available to you right now and it will not be available forever. Use it while it is still fresh in everyone's memory.

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