There’s something bittersweet about winning that big contract you’ve been chasing for months. The celebration, the congratulations from the team, the mental calculation of what this could mean for the business. It’s a good day.
The British Promotional Merchandise Association (BPMA) reports that the UK promotional merchandise sector reached £1.232 billion in 2024, up 4.2% from the previous year[1]. Meanwhile in the US, the industry hit a record $26.6 billion in sales[2]. For distributors of all sizes, this represents real opportunity.
Let’s dive a little deeper. Recent industry research shows that large distributors – those with over US$2.5 million in annual sales – now account for 54% of the US market (PPAI 2024)[3]. More tellingly, larger distributors outperformed small and medium-sized distributors in terms of sales growth in 2024 (ASI February 2025)[2-1]. The gap between large and small distributors is widening.
For larger distributors, this brings challenges. When you’re already handling significant volume and you win even bigger contracts, the operational strain can be substantial. The systems and processes that got you to this level may struggle to take you to the next one.
The Day After Victory
Picture this: your sales team has just landed a contract that’s three times larger than anything you’ve handled before. There’s excitement in the office. Then someone asks the dreaded question: “So, how exactly are we going to process all these orders?”
Even for established distributors with proven systems, scaling up presents challenges. What worked well at your current volume suddenly looks inadequate. This isn’t anyone’s fault, it’s just what happens when you grow faster than your infrastructure can adapt.
When Manual Becomes Impossible
Let’s talk about what happens when your sales team is processing orders by hand. For five orders a day, it’s manageable. For five hundred orders? That’s when things start to unravel.
Sales people are hired to sell – good at building relationships, understanding client needs, and closing. But when they’re spending half their day copying information between spreadsheets and checking details manually, something will feel off.
The real problem isn’t just the time, it’s what happens to margins. If manual processing is adding hours to each order, those hours cost money. Meanwhile, competitive pressure means pricing stays tight, and the real cost of that additional work may be hidden on the P+L under “overheads”.
Three Things That Get Harder at Scale
1. The Quote That Takes Too Long
Creating a quote shouldn’t be difficult, but here’s how it works in many distributors: Pricing information lives in different places – supplier spreadsheets, old emails, someone’s notebook. Pulling it all together means checking multiple sources, and if you miss something, the quote could be wrong.
Then there’s creating the actual document. Some sales people have templates, others have a system which produces something that looks really basic, and might create questions rather than orders. The client’s waiting, your team’s working too hard, and the time it took could’ve been spent developing new opportunities.
Speed matters when you’re competing for contracts. So does accuracy – there’s little worse than winning a contract based on a quote that turns out to be unprofitable because someone used outdated pricing.
2. The Automation That Doesn’t Quite Work
Here’s a scenario we’ve heard more than once: a distributor invests in a system that’s supposed to automate order processing. Orders download automatically from the client’s system. Brilliant – except they’re not quite ready to process.
Maybe the tax calculation is wrong for certain regions. Perhaps the product codes don’t quite match between systems. So someone still needs to check every order and make manual corrections. You’ve paid for automation, you’re using automation, but you’re still doing manual work.
It’s frustrating because you’re so close to having a solution. The technology is there, it’s just not quite connected in the way that would actually save time.
3. Getting Orders Ready for the Warehouse
Once an order is confirmed, it needs to reach the warehouse in a format that makes fulfillment straightforward. This means checking several things: Are the shipping calculations correct? Is everything actually in stock? Are the addresses formatted properly?
That last point can be trickier than it sounds. Domestic UK addresses are relatively consistent, but international shipping is different. Countries like India and Russia have complex addressing systems, large populations, and address formats that don’t always fit neatly into standard fields.
If an address is wrong, the order gets delayed, you might pay unexpected duty and customs fees, the client gets frustrated, and someone has to spend time fixing it. These are small issues individually, but at scale they add up to significant delays and extra work for your team.
The Margin Challenge
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: operational inefficiencies cost money. More time spent on each order means higher labour costs. At the same time, winning contracts often means competitive pricing, and there’s always someone willing to quote a bit lower.
Higher costs and lower prices is pushing distributors towards automation, which makes sense in theory. In practice, though, automation that doesn’t fully solve the problem can sometimes make things worse rather than better, and worse – that cost is hidden away on your profit reports under “overheads”.
The goal isn’t just to digitise existing processes, it’s to reduce the amount of manual work required. That’s hard, and it’s why many distributors find themselves in that uncomfortable middle ground of partial automation.
Maintaining Your Competitive Edge
The data tells us that large distributors are pulling ahead. The 54% market share held by distributors over US$2.5 million (PPAI 2024)[3-1], combined with their faster growth rates (ASI 2025)[2-2], suggests that operational excellence at scale is the way to go. The challenge is to create enough margin to fund the infrastructure that you need to handle the next level of growth.
The three issues outlined earlier – quoting efficiency, effective automation, and warehouse preparation – have one thing in common, which is repetition. With these short tasks repeated hundreds of times, an extra 30 minutes per quote, or 30 minutes correcting an order, could translate into needing more full time employees.
Platforms that can pull together pricing from multiple suppliers, validate addresses for international shipping, handle tax calculations correctly across different regions, and ensure orders are warehouse-ready without manual intervention – these exist. The challenge is connecting them in a way that fits your way of doing business.
At GetConnect, we’ve built our Hub product specifically to help B2B sales teams connect their systems and automate these kinds of workflows. This platform is designed to address your challenges, using everything we’ve learned in 20 years of helping Promotional Merchandise Distributors to automate systems.
Perhaps the GetConnect Hub can help your business work around some of these challenges. We start by understanding your specific situation – your suppliers, your systems, your bottlenecks—and exploring whether our platform can genuinely help rather than just adding another system to manage.
For more infomation on GetConnect email gareth@getconnect.net or call 0333 240 7426
References
- Cognitive Market Research, “Promotional Product Statistics 2025,” https://www.giftafeeling.com/pages/promotional-product-statistics-2025↩︎
- Advertising Specialty Institute (ASI), “ASI Reports Record $26.6 Billion in Annual Sales for Promo Products Industry,” February 2025, https://asicentral.com/press-releases/asi-reports-record-26-6-billion-in-annual-sales-for-promo-products-industry/
- Promotional Products Association International (PPAI), “2024 – US Distributors’ Promotional Products Sales,” https://www.ppai.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/2024-PPAI-Sales-Volume-Report.pdf
