Van Sales, Pre-Sales or Standing Orders: Which Model for Which Customer?

The van sales vs pre-sales question is rarely answered once for the whole business, because the honest answer is almost never one model for every customer. A cash-led corner shop, a supermarket depot on a standing order and a café that phones through a top-up twice a week are three different commercial relationships, and forcing them all through the same operating model quietly costs margin at both ends: vans carrying stock nobody buys, or drops too small to justify the diesel. This article pins down the terminology (including where DSD actually sits), sets out a customer-by-customer decision framework, and works through an example of segmenting a mixed customer base.

Van sales vs pre-sales vs DSD: what each term is actually for

The vocabulary blurs between businesses, so it is worth pinning down before deciding anything — starting with the term that causes the most confusion.

• Van sales — the rep sells from stock on the vehicle. The order is created, picked from the van, invoiced and often paid at the doorstep in one visit. The van is a mobile warehouse and the driver is a salesperson.
• Pre-sales (field sales) — a rep or telesales agent books the order first, on a planned call cycle, with pricing and credit checked at the point of capture. The order is then picked in the warehouse and delivered on a later route. Selling and delivering are separate jobs, often separate days.
• Standing / pre-order delivery — a pre-agreed, recurring order: the Tuesday bread drop, the daily milk round. Nobody sells anything on the day; the route exists to fulfil a schedule reliably, capture proof of delivery and handle exceptions such as returns or shortages.

The five questions that decide the model

Run each customer — or each segment — through these in order. The answers point at a model without much argument.

1. How predictable is what they buy?

If the basket is stable week to week, pre-selling or a standing order converts that predictability into a clean pick in the warehouse and a lighter van. If the basket genuinely depends on what the buyer sees, or on shelf gaps on the day, van sales earns its keep: the range on the vehicle is the sales tool.

2. What is the drop worth, and how is it paid?

Cash-led, smaller-basket customers suit van sales — the visit combines selling, delivery and collection, so one journey carries three jobs. Higher-value account customers with formal ordering suit pre-sales or standing/pre-order delivery, where credit limits and agreed pricing are enforced when the order is captured rather than negotiated on a doorstep.

3. Does the visit need selling skill or delivery reliability?

Merchandising, range extension, chasing gaps on the shelf — that is rep work, and it argues for van sales or a pre-sales call cycle. If the customer mainly needs the right goods at the right time with clean proof of delivery, that is a delivery discipline — and pure delivery routes can often be planned more densely, because no selling time is budgeted at the stop. Whether they end up cheaper depends on the geography, the drop values and the service constraints — which is exactly what question five checks.

4. How perishable is the product, and who eats the returns?

Short-life goods on speculative van stock become wastage the moment demand wobbles, which often favours pre-sold or standing orders for short-life lines, so production can follow demand — though some short-life categories run successfully through van sales where replenishment is frequent enough. Longer-life lines tolerate the speculative range a sales van needs.

5. What does it cost to serve them — and does the drop carry it?

Two customers with identical annual revenue can have completely different economics. Illustrative: one buys £10,400 a year as a weekly £200 pre-order on a dense urban run; the other buys the same £10,400 as a twice-weekly £100 van-sales visit at the far end of a rural round. Same revenue, twice the visits, more selling time per visit, more miles per drop. So before fixing a model, check the service frequency the customer genuinely needs, any delivery-window constraints, and whether the resulting drop value clears your minimum viable drop — if it does not, the model decision is really a frequency-and-minimum-order conversation, and working out that minimum is a cost-per-drop calculation that deserves its own arithmetic.

A worked segmentation

Take a regional snacks-and-drinks distributor with 300 active customers. Running the five questions across the ledger might produce something like:

Two things usually fall out of an exercise like this. First, the fringe segment is where the quiet losses live — customers nobody chose to serve by van, who simply ended up there. Second, the boundaries move: a van-sales customer whose basket has stabilised is a promotion candidate to pre-sales, which frees van stock and rep time for the accounts that still need selling. Reviewing the segmentation a couple of times a year keeps the models matched to what customers actually do now, not what they did when they opened the account.

When a mixed model is the right answer

Segmentation sometimes lands on a split within one customer, and that is legitimate rather than messy. A common shape: a core basket that barely changes goes onto a standing order, delivered on the most reliable schedule — while promotions, seasonal lines and impulse ranges ride a van-sales or pre-sales visit at lower frequency. The customer gets reliability on the core and attention on the upside; the distributor gets a plannable pick for most of the volume and keeps selling time where it can actually change the order. The test for whether a hybrid is worth its complexity is simple: does each flow carry its own drop economics, and do both post to one account so the relationship still reconciles as one customer? If yes, a hybrid is not an exception to the framework — it is the framework applied at line level instead of account level.

Running a mixed model without running three systems

The reason distributors resist segmenting properly is rarely commercial — it is operational. Three models can mean three processes: one tool for rep ordering, another for the vans, spreadsheets for the standing orders, and a fourth reconciliation job at day end. That is the problem a single sales-and-distribution platform exists to remove.

RouteMagic runs all three models on one platform and one data spine. Van sales reps sell, invoice and collect payment at the door from live van stock, offline-first. Field sales reps book orders on planned beats with the customer’s pricelist and credit limit enforced as the order is captured, synced straight to fulfilment. Standing and recurring orders generate themselves on schedule and flow onto delivery routes with electronic proof of delivery at the drop — the full wholesale distribution motion, executing the direct-store-delivery pattern that RouteMagic’s van sales page describes from the selling side. Because every model shares the same customers, products, pricing and stock, the van sales vs pre-sales vs standing-delivery decision is made per customer rather than per system — changing how a customer is served does not mean moving them into a separate system, and the day’s cash, invoices and stock reconcile in one place regardless of which model produced them.

Conclusion

The clarification worth carrying out of this article is the one that untangles most model debates: DSD is the delivery umbrella — supplying outlets directly — and the operating decision inside it is how each customer’s order should be created and served. Run every account through the five factors: how predictable the basket is, what the drop is worth and how it is paid, whether the visit needs selling or reliability, how perishable the product is, and what it costs to serve the customer at the frequency they need. The answers will not produce one model, and they are not supposed to — a customer base that genuinely contains different buying patterns should end up on different models, and a hybrid within one account is the framework working, not standardisation failing. A practical next step: segment the active ledger with the five questions, then spend the review time on the exceptions — the accounts where the current model and the answers disagree — before changing any routes or systems.