The delivery game of telephone: what it costs your HORECA sales team

It's 11:40 on a Friday. Your sales rep is standing at the bar of a new restaurant, about to walk the owner through the seasonal wine list. Their phone buzzes. It's Toni, from the bar on the square: "Hey, is the truck coming today or what? I'm about to run out of keg for the vermouth."

Your rep apologizes, steps outside and calls dispatch. Dispatch doesn't know off the top of their head, so they call the driver, who's driving and doesn't pick up. Ten minutes later, the driver calls back: forty minutes out. Dispatch calls the rep. The rep texts Toni. Toni replies with a thumbs up.

By the time your rep walks back in, the restaurant owner is already talking to the coffee supplier.

If you distribute to hospitality, you know this scene. It happens several times a day, with every rep, every week. And because each instance feels small, almost nobody measures it.

Why HORECA customers call their sales rep (not logistics)

In distribution to bars, restaurants and hotels, the relationship is personal. Your customer doesn't know anyone in the warehouse or the dispatch office. They know their rep: the one who visits every week, who gets them the price, who has their WhatsApp.

So when something about the delivery worries them, they message the rep:

• "What time is it arriving today?"
• "I'm missing a case of tonic."
• "Can you send me the delivery note? My accountant needs it."
• "The driver left the order at the back door. Did anyone sign for it?"

These are reasonable questions. A restaurant owner plans the kitchen, the bar and the staff around when the stock arrives. Wanting to know isn't a whim: it's how they work.

What breaks down is the path the answer has to travel.

The game of telephone: three people to pass on one fact

Look at what happens with every question. The customer asks the rep. The rep asks dispatch. Dispatch asks the driver. And the answer travels back the same way, phone to phone.

Three people interrupted to relay something that already exists somewhere: where the truck is and how long it will take.

Every hop has a cost:

• Your sales rep cuts short a visit, a negotiation or an afternoon of prospecting.
• Your dispatch team stops planning, or stops handling real surprises, to act as a switchboard.
• Your driver picks up the phone mid-route, loses rhythm and, at worst, gets distracted at the wheel.

And what finally reaches the customer is a secondhand estimate, half an hour late. If that time slips, the next message isn't a question anymore. It's a complaint.

Let's run the numbers

A simple example. Adjust the figures to your operation.

A HORECA sales rep with 100 to 150 accounts gets, on a normal day, between six and ten questions about deliveries. Reading the message, calling dispatch, waiting, calling back and replying easily takes five to ten minutes each. Not counting the time it takes to pick up where they left off.

That's around one hour a day. Five hours a week. Over roughly 45 working weeks a year, more than 200 hours per rep: over five full working weeks spent as a messenger.

Now multiply by your team. With eight reps, that's close to 1,800 hours a year. Add dispatch's hours and the calls to drivers.

Salesforce's State of Sales reports have been saying the same thing for years: sales reps spend less than half their week actually selling. The rest goes on admin, internal tasks and follow-up. In HORECA distribution, chasing deliveries is one of the biggest of those tasks. And one of the easiest to get rid of.

The cost that never shows up on an invoice

The hours are what you can see. What costs the most never appears in any report.

The sales that never happen

One hour a day is one or two fewer visits. It's the new restaurant nobody went to open, the seasonal product nobody presented, the bar that buys your beer and could also be buying your wine, water and coffee.

Your rep didn't stop selling for lack of drive. They were on the phone with dispatch.

That opportunity cost is the most expensive of all, because it never shows up as a loss. The sale simply doesn't exist.

The customers who don't come back

In hospitality, running out of stock on a Friday night is not something people forget. If the order arrives late and nobody warned them, the owner has to improvise: change the menu, rush to the cash-and-carry, tell a guest it's sold out. The second or third time, they start listening to the competitor's rep.

Delays happen, and your customer understands that. What wears the relationship down is uncertainty: not knowing, having to ask, getting times that then aren't met.

Keeping a customer is far cheaper than winning a new one. According to Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer costs between 5 and 25 times more than retaining an existing one. And the Bain & Company research cited in the same article estimates that increasing retention by 5% can raise profits by 25% to 95%. In a low-margin sector with a competitor on every corner, every bar that switches distributor over a bad delivery experience takes a long time to make up for.

The toll on your own team

There's one more, less visible cost: the rep who feels their job is putting out fires. Nobody goes into sales to work a switchboard. When a big part of the day goes on chasing trucks, motivation drops. And so does the quality of the visits.

What you can automate (almost all of it)

The good news is that this problem has a fairly simple fix. Most of the questions repeat, and the answer is already in the route data:

• When is it arriving? An automatic notification when the order goes out for delivery, with an ETA that updates if the truck runs late.
• Where is it? A live tracking link, like the one we all get when we shop online.
• Was it delivered? Who signed? Digital proof of delivery with signature, photo and time, available instantly to your customer and your team.
• Can you send me the delivery note? A digital delivery note, sent when the delivery is closed.
• Something unexpected came up. The driver logs it in the app with a photo and a comment, and the information reaches the right people without a chain of calls.

When your customer has this information before they need it, they stop asking. And when your rep has it one click away, any question that does come in gets answered in ten seconds, without bothering anyone.

Where Routal fits in

Routal plans your routes around each bar's, restaurant's or hotel's receiving window, and from there keeps everyone informed. Your customer gets automatic notifications with the estimated arrival time and a link to follow their order live. Your driver records the delivery in the app with signature, photo and comments. And your team, sales reps included, can see the status of every delivery without calling anyone.

The result is less noise for everyone. The customer knows when the order is coming. Dispatch gets back to planning. The driver drives. And your rep gets back to what they do best: visiting customers and selling.

Where to start

If you want to know how much the game of telephone is costing you, try this next week:

1. Ask your reps to log every delivery question they get over five days: who asked, what they asked and how long it took to resolve.
2. Group the questions. You'll see that almost all of them are three or four repeat questions: arrival time, delivery confirmation, delivery note and missing items.
3. Add up the hours and put a price on them. Not just the salary cost: think about how many more visits each rep could make with that time.

With those numbers in front of you, the decision usually makes itself.

Your sales team is there to grow the book of business. Start by measuring how many hours a week go into the game of telephone. And if you'd like to see what your operation would look like with automatic notifications, book a call with us →