How Far in Advance Should You Call a Customer About a Reorder?

Too early and too late both cost you

Call weeks ahead of the account's usual gap and the customer is not ready; the order is small or they put you off. Call weeks after it and a competitor may have already shipped. The sweet spot sits in between, and it is different for every account and every product.

There is also a relationship cost to getting it wrong. Call too often and you become noise the buyer learns to ignore. Reach out at the right moment and the same buyer reads the call as service worth picking up.

Anchor the call to the window

The right time is near the front edge of the reorder window: a few days short of the interval that account has kept between its own orders. If their glove orders have landed 24 days apart for two years, day 21 or 22 is the call. That leaves room for the delivery, and it reaches the buyer around the time reordering is on their list anyway.

For a product that ships next day, the lead can be short. For one that moves on a slower freight schedule, the call needs to come sooner.

Why a fixed rule does not work

A blanket rule like call everyone two weeks out ignores that a hospital's glove orders land every few weeks while a small office's paper order lands every few months. The right lead time is set per account, off the spacing of that account's own orders.

Letting the data set the timing

Reorder prediction reads each account's order history, finds the center of its reorder window and the slack around it, and flags the account when it enters that window. The rep gets a call that is timed to the account, not to a calendar rule, so the conversation lands when the customer is ready and there is still time to deliver.