---
title: "13 Key Points in Managing Distributors"
description: "Distributors are the main carriers of the modern market circulation channel, directly delivering products to the end, and they play a dominant role that no enterprise can ignore. This article offers 13 key points for managing distributors, including analyzing sales growth, payment collection, inventory, promotion participation, and more, along with methods for effective management."
author: "訾惠博"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2014-12-31"
language: "en"
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# 13 Key Points in Managing Distributors

> Distributors are the main carriers of the modern market circulation channel, directly delivering products to the end, and they play a dominant role that no enterprise can ignore. This article offers 13 key points for managing distributors, including analyzing sales growth, payment collection, inventory, promotion participation, and more, along with methods for effective management.

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As the main carriers of the contemporary market's primary distribution channels, distributors directly deliver products to the end, playing a dominant role that no enterprise can afford to ignore. Every enterprise has its own measures for managing distributors. The following are some personal suggestions for your reference.

**1. Sales Growth Rate Analysis:**
Analyze the growth of sales. In principle, a distributor with a significant increase in sales is an excellent one, but the growth must be analyzed in detail. Sales representatives should compare the growth with market conditions and the average growth of their company's products. If a distributor's sales are increasing but market share or the average growth rate of your company's products is not rising or even falling, it can be concluded that our management of this distributor is not adequate.

**2. Payment Collection Statistics:**
Analyze annual and monthly sales and collections, and check the content of sales. If annual sales are increasing but monthly sales fluctuate significantly, the sales situation is not healthy. Only when a distributor's sales show steady growth can management be considered complete.

**3. Understanding Company Policies:**
Sales representatives should not blindly pursue sales growth. They should ensure distributors understand the company's policies and comply with them, thereby promoting sales growth. Unfair practices such as disrupting market competition or cross-region selling may increase sales but harm the company's overall interests and are detrimental. Therefore, making distributors understand, comply with, and cooperate with company policies is a crucial aspect of distributor management.

**4. Inventory Status:**
Frequent stockouts indicate that the distributor does not value your company's products and also suggest that the sales representative has insufficient contact with the distributor, which is a serious dereliction of duty. Stockouts cause the company to lose many opportunities, so effective inventory management is the most basic responsibility of a sales representative in distributor management.

**5. Participation in Promotional Activities:**
Does the distributor actively participate in and fully cooperate with various promotional activities organized by your company? If they participate in every promotion and sales increase accordingly, it indicates proper management. If the distributor is unwilling to participate or cooperate, the sales representative must analyze the reasons and formulate countermeasures. Without distributor participation and cooperation, promotional activities will only cost money without results.

**6. Visit Plan:**
Management of distributors is mainly conducted through sales visits. Sales representatives should review their visit activities. A common mistake is to frequently visit distributors with large sales or good relationships, while visiting less often those with lower sales but potential, or those with high sales but poor relationships. This practice should be absolutely avoided.

**7. Visit Status:**
Sales representatives should analyze their visits to distributors. First, check whether the visit plan was seriously executed, such as planning to visit a certain number of distributors daily, and compare with actual results. If the monthly plan completion rate is low, analyze the reasons. Second, visits should be constructive, meaning each visit should help the distributor's management. Distributors should welcome visits and not see them as a nuisance; only then are visits successful.

**8. Concern for Your Company:**
The distributor's concern for your company and whether they maintain a positive attitude are important aspects of management. Sales representatives should regularly explain the company's policies and directions to distributors to keep them interested and expectant.

**9. Evaluation of Your Company:**
Is your company's position in the industry significant to the distributor? In other words, does the distributor actively expect to increase sales? Sales representatives should establish their own status in the distributor's mind, demonstrate the comprehensive quality of a large enterprise, and help the distributor.

**10. Frequency of Suggestions:**
Each distributor has unique characteristics, so management should be tailored to these characteristics for effective results. The strategy for each distributor and the suggestions to be made must be analyzed in advance. If sales representatives actively manage distributors, the frequency of suggestions will greatly increase.

**11. Organization of Distributor Data:**
If sales representatives can recite sales statistics, growth rates, and sales targets for distributors, it indicates good management. Conversely, if they know nothing about distributor data and only blindly sell, any sales increase is short-term. Therefore, recording and organizing distributor data is a crucial task.

**12. Assisting in Terminal Store Management:**
Although terminal stores fall under the distributor's scope, since stores only recognize the manufacturer's brand, their perception of the manufacturer determines their feelings about product quality, efficacy, and brand. Therefore, we should visit terminal stores, communicate with store managers, listen to their opinions and suggestions for improvement on our series products, and also build relationships.

**13. Assisting Distributors in Understanding Competitors:**
Distributors usually focus on business and lack professional market research. Our sales representatives should combine routine market visits with careful observation and analysis of competitors' products and activities, and communicate this information to distributors promptly so they can stay informed of market conditions and adjust marketing tactics accordingly.

The above are the 13 key points for daily management of distributors. Methods for managing distributors include:

1. **Distributor Data Cards:** Sales representatives must regularly check distributor data cards to ensure the above items are accurately recorded, organized, and updated.
2. **Analyze Distributor Data:** All data related to distributors should be analyzed in detail.
3. **Distributor Visits:** Problems can be identified and countermeasures found through conversations with distributors and observation of hospital situations.
4. **Others:** Utilize opportunities such as distributor visits to the company, industry information, and sales meetings for management.

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