"What Can I Sell Right Now?" The Number Your Sales Team Needs (and Most Systems Won't Give Them)
Your rep is on the phone with a buyer. The buyer wants 600 units of your best seller, shipped December 1.
The rep pulls up the inventory report: on hand, allocated, on order, in transit, committed.
So can they say yes?
Too often, the answer is "Let me check and get back to you." By then, the buyer has ordered from someone else.
The one number your reps need
Salespeople don't need to know everything in the warehouse, on order at the factory, or in transit. They need to know what they can sell now, or on a specific later date.
That's your Available to Sell (ATS): what's left after everything already promised to another customer.
Here's the problem: most systems won't tell you that number. They show the pieces and leave the math to the rep.
"Today" and "December 1" are different answers
Every rep is really asking two questions:
What can I sell and ship now?
What can I sell to ship on a future date?
Say you have 1,000 units on hand and 700 are already sold. You can sell 300 today.
But another 1,500 units land November 15, and 500 of those are already sold to ship in late November. So for December 1, you can sell 1,300.
The rep who saw "300" and turned down that 1300-unit December order just walked away from a sale. The rep who saw "1800" and took an 1800-unit December order just oversold the item. That will cause trouble down the line.
What your reps should see
Not five columns of numbers. This:
| Item | Available Now | Available Dec 1 | Available Jan 15 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Style 1042, Navy | 300 | 1,300 | 3,300 |
| Style 1042, Black | 0 | 250 | 1,250 |
| Style 2210, Red | 820 | 820 | 1,620 |
One glance. No math. No call to the warehouse.
Those future numbers already take out orders booked to ship later, like the 500 units sold for late November. The rep sees what’s truly available, not what’s on the shelf.
Why most systems make it hard
Most inventory reports are built for the warehouse or for accounting, not for sales:
The numbers live in different places: inventory here, open orders there, POs in a spreadsheet.
Incoming goods have no reliable date, so the system can't tell you what's available for a future ship date.
Reports go stale. Monday's export is wrong by Tuesday.
When reps can't trust the numbers, they either undersell and leave money on the table, or oversell and end up with short shipments, cancellations, and chargebacks.
One more layer: multiple warehouses
Ship from more than one warehouse? Your reps also need to know where the goods are available. 500 units in New York is a different promise than 500 units in LA.
Future goods add a twist. When a container has yet to hit the water, you may not have decided whether it goes to LA or NY. That's not a problem, it's flexibility: those units can be sold from either warehouse, then routed to wherever the order is. A good system shows reps that, instead of leaving incoming goods out of the picture.
Your reps should be selling, not doing math.
Get the right numbers. Keep them simple. Get selling.
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