A local fashion brand selling through wholesale, its own online store and a couple of marketplace listings had grown steadily for three years. Wholesale was the highest margin channel by far, but it still ran entirely through the founder. Two junior sales hires handled smaller accounts and marketplace relationships, while every meaningful buyer meeting and every re-order conversation with major retail partners went through the founder personally.
What the audit found
There was no CRM in use for wholesale specifically. Quotes, terms and order history were tracked across email threads and a shared spreadsheet that nobody kept consistently updated. There was no clear line dividing which accounts the junior reps could own versus which needed the founder's involvement, so by default, everything of any size ended up on the founder's desk. The compensation plan paid the same flat rate regardless of account size or margin, giving reps no reason to prioritise the accounts that actually mattered to the business.
What changed
- Built a simple account tiering system, so reps owned clearly defined mid-size accounts while the founder kept a short list of top-tier relationships
- Introduced a lightweight CRM specifically for wholesale, replacing the email-and-spreadsheet approach
- Reworked the comp plan to weight commission toward account tier and margin, rather than a flat rate per order
The takeaway
The constraint wasn't the team's ability to sell. It was that the business had no structure for deciding who should be having which conversation, so everything defaulted to the founder. Once that structure existed, the team could actually use the capacity it already had.