How MADE Saved Their Sales Team 50 Hours A Month With Mapmatix

MADE I Materials for Designers is an e-commerce and brick-and-mortar company that represents leading vendors in the interior design industry. MADE helps designers find solutions for complex projects in the residential, commercial, and hospitality fields.

On an operational level, MADE acts as a conduit for manufacturers and consumers and performs customer service on their behalf. With this setup, although MADE never invoices the customer, they are responsible for recording the purchase and keeping track of the drop shipment.

In the past and to ensure visibility, MADE had created a dummy account to generate POs and track sales. To do this, they employed the software platform Zoho Books, an online accounting software that is designed for businesses to manage invoices, bills, banking, and inventory.

Unfortunately, MADE’s sales team needs to turn sales orders into invoices for their manufacturers to ensure they receive the correct commission. Zoho’s native interface does not permit a change to the customer name for invoicing purposes. This left the team with the arduous task of recreating every PO for invoicing and calculating their earned commissions manually, adding a significant amount of time per sale and plenty of room for human error.

The MapMatix team got to work to develop and implement an automation that would notify the MADE team that a sales order has been generated and then take all the relevant fields in Zoho and create an invoice to forward to the manufacturer.

Once the first phase was completed, the MapMatix team identified additional opportunities that were not a part of the original request.

The team was able to modify the original request and create an automation that would automatically calculate the order’s commission and generate invoices with those commission values already accounted for.

“Ya'll are wizards. I can't believe you were able to do what you did. I'm impressed!” 

Thanks to their new automated process, the MADE sales representatives have been able to save an average of 5 minutes per sale.

With 4 salespeople, each of whom spends approximately 30 minutes of effort every day on invoicing alone, the new automation is projected to save them 10 hours a week, or 520 hours a year.

The new automation also removes human error by removing human input. Whereas before invoices were manually re-entered into the software to create an empty order for tracking purposes, now they could be cloned and sent directly to the manufacturer without any need for the salesperson to re-enter information.

Although secondary to their initial outcome, this element of the automation alone could save the company thousands of dollars in missed commission opportunities.

Although not the original purpose of employing Zoho, commissions are now automatically categorized as part of the invoice cloning process.

With a few small tweaks, the MapMatix team leveraged the platform to develop a unique reporting dashboard for MADE where they can easily visualize their commissions without additional manual effort to reconcile and collect data.

MADE I Materials for Designers is an e-commerce and brick-and-mortar company that represents leading vendors in the interior design industry. MADE helps designers find solutions for complex projects in the residential, commercial, and hospitality fields.