The 'old-school customer' problem in B2B

Who is the "old-school customer"?

Every distributor has a few: the account that still faxes an order in, the buyer who'll only ever call and only ever ask for "Dave," the customer who replies to the portal link with a free-text email and a "just put it on our usual." Internally they get a label — old-school, the ones who won't get with the program.

The reframe worth sitting with: they're not behind the times, and they're usually not a problem. They're rational, they're often your most loyal accounts, and the friction you feel isn't their stubbornness. It's the gap between how they want to order and how you've decided orders should be placed. The "old-school customer problem" is, more often than not, a supplier framing problem — and the label quietly points you at the wrong fix.

Are they really afraid of technology?

No. The same person who won't use your portal banks on their phone and runs their business on software. They've simply decided your particular portal isn't worth the effort — and from where they sit, they're usually right.

A buyer who orders from fifteen suppliers isn't going to maintain fifteen portals. Phoning in "the usual plus two cases" takes thirty seconds and zero learning. Logging into your system, remembering the password, and rebuilding the order takes longer and benefits them not at all. The portal optimizes for your data entry, not their time. Choosing the faster option isn't being old-school; it's being efficient.

What are they actually telling you?

When a customer keeps ordering the way they always have despite your nudges, they're communicating something useful: this relationship works for me, and I don't want friction added to it. McKinsey's B2B buying research has consistently found that roughly a third of buyers want human, relationship-led interaction at every stage — not as a transitional phase, but as a durable preference. The phone-and-email customer isn't a holdout waiting to be converted. They're a third of the market, by design.

And they tend to be the good third. Customers who order by trust rather than by comparison-shopping are typically the loyal, steady, less price-sensitive ones. The very habits that earn the "old-school" label are the habits that make them your best accounts.

What do these accounts look like on the spreadsheet?

Better than the label suggests. A relationship buyer isn't putting you up against three competitors on every order, so pricing holds and fewer bids are lost to a rival who's a penny cheaper. They reorder predictably — often the same items on the same rhythm — which makes demand easier to plan. They cost almost nothing to retain, because what keeps them is a relationship you already have. And they're the buyers most likely to refer another like them.

Set that against the "cost" you're trying to eliminate — minutes of typing per order — and the trade looks lopsided. The economics say the old-school customer is closer to the kind of account the rest of your sales effort is trying to create.

Why does "fixing" them backfire?

Push, and the best case is a few migrate and you save some data entry. The real case worth weighing: you add friction to a relationship that was working, and a loyal customer starts wondering whether the supplier making their life harder is still the easiest to deal with. They have other suppliers who'll happily take the order their way. You'd be spending relationship capital to save clerical work, and that math rarely favors the push.

There's a quieter cost too. Every hour spent trying to convert reluctant customers is an hour not spent serving them well.

What actually resolves it?

Separate the two things the label conflates. The customer's channel isn't the problem; the manual work it creates is. The customer phoning in an order isn't the issue — someone retyping that order by hand is the issue. You can fix the second without touching the first.

Here's what that looks like in practice for small and mid-sized US wholesale distributors on QuickBooks Online. The emailed orders — free-text body, PDF attached, spreadsheet attached — are captured and structured automatically: matched to your catalog, priced for that account, flagged where anything's unclear, and reviewed by a person before the Estimate lands in QuickBooks Online. The phoned or faxed order gets added by your team in one click as a manual entry — same editor, same pricing, same review, same export — so it lives in the one queue instead of on a notepad. To be clear about the boundary: nothing records, transcribes, or reads the call or the faxed page; a person still takes the order, once, and the system carries it from there. "The usual" resolves from that customer's history instead of from memory.

The customer changes nothing. You lose the manual cost, not the relationship.

What this means for distributors

Retire the label. Offer a portal for the customers who genuinely want one — some do, and the death of the B2B portal covers where portals still fit — but stop measuring success by how many holdouts you've converted. Measure it by how cheaply and accurately you can serve every customer the way they actually order. Do that and the "old-school customer problem" dissolves, because there was never a problem with the customer in the first place.

PeasyOrders is built for exactly this absorption job. It starts at $99 a month with a 30-day money-back guarantee — see pricing.