Today I will discuss a hot topic in marketing—if I were a Coca-Cola regional manager, how would I expand the business? How would I think about and solve problems at work? How would I implement management? What are the key milestones for the current period? I want to have a simple communication, and I also ask colleagues to give suggestions, and then see how we can supplement and improve our daily management work.

-01- Customer Data Authenticity and Validity For the management of the urban area of a prefecture-level city (excluding county towns), every salesperson must have a real and valid customer list. As regional managers, branch managers, and supervisors, you need to verify each salesperson's list one by one, and regularly clean and update it.

First, it is essential to ensure that the customer lists of salespeople in prefecture-level and provincial capital urban areas are authentic. They need to have 240 real downstream customers, 120 real direct-operated customers, and 90 real wholesale customers.

Having real customer data is just the first step; having real, sufficient, and up-to-standard customer numbers is only the beginning of all management work. The most important thing is to ensure that salespeople have enough active customers, and ideally, they should be active every week. Salespeople without enough active customers will eventually hit bottlenecks in achieving their monthly targets.

Regional managers, branch managers, and supervisors need to review each salesperson's customer list one by one from Margin Minder. Many customers haven't placed orders for a year, and some only order 1-2 standard boxes a year, which indicates that the salesperson is artificially inflating activity.

According to market layout, the company requires developing direct operations, and under pressure, salespeople may use improper methods to create active customers.

Figure 1 Figure 1 shows the number of customers managed by salespeople on a route, comparing this year and last year. The number of customers is around 100. It seems the number of customers is acceptable.

If we click in to see the annual purchase situation of each route's customers, we will find that the actual number of effective purchasing customers is very low, only 30 customers. Figure 2 clearly shows the real situation of customers on the route. Figure 3 reflects fake customers, who purchase only a few boxes a year, or even zero.

Figure 2 Figure 3

As a regional manager, you must be very clear that ensuring the accuracy of each salesperson's customer data and ensuring each salesperson's daily customer activity rate reaches 60% or above is the primary and most important task, and the key thing to focus on every day! Only then can your salespeople truly take action, and only then will they feel real execution pressure. Otherwise, it's just lip service.

Data that salespeople casually tell you is not accurate; you need to verify it carefully and ask yourself: What is the basis? For this issue, you must develop a habit of digging to the bottom and have a spirit of persistence. Do not adopt careless or sloppy work styles. Teams that achieve good results are mostly those that are closely monitored, tracking every package and every customer every day.

Monitoring the accuracy and authenticity of each salesperson's customer data is the beginning of all management work and is a matter of salesperson work attitude; while customer activity is a matter of salesperson capability. This requires you to spend a little time at the morning meeting every day, share case studies, tell a small story from your own experience the previous day, or have a top-performing salesperson share insights with the team.

At the same time, you should deliberately find salespeople to accompany them on their routes. Accompanying salespeople on routes is very important: first, you can understand the real situation of their routes; second, by visiting, communicating, and improving in-store work together, you can quickly build trust and emotional connection. Naturally, salespeople will have an evaluation and score of you as a leader.

The diligence of a regional manager is crucial to team influence, project promotion, KPI improvement, and result achievement. Therefore, the accuracy and validity of each salesperson's customer data is the most important, fundamental work in management, and the starting point for effective management.

-02- Decomposing and Tracking Targets In the management process, if you can only do one thing, what should you do? It is target management. It should be noted that knowing how to decompose targets is an art, and knowing how to track targets is a responsibility.

First, obey the targets set by the company; this is basic, and it is the duty and responsibility of the sales team. If you think the target decomposition is unfair or inappropriate, it is recommended to accept it first and go all out to achieve it. There are always more methods than problems.

Once your superior supervisor realizes that the target is unreasonable, they will make adjustments and balances, or make reasonable adjustments between months. Regardless of the outcome, promoting positive energy is the main theme. Because we are all human, sometimes there are things we cannot see or think of. As a regional manager, you will face the same issues when decomposing targets for your subordinates. Therefore, the team should develop a good work style of obeying targets from top to bottom and bottom to top.

Target decomposition is generally based on the proportion of route share and the form and intensity of policies and activities in the same period as the basis for target decomposition.

According to the principles of target decomposition, first, clarify what happened in the same period historically? Were there any sudden anomalies in data? Where were the opportunities in the same period? Rank the main customers of each operating unit in descending order of year-to-date incremental growth to see which customers have problems. If your incremental growth is offset by negative growth from some customers, it is a half-hearted effort. Therefore, try to reduce the number of negative-growth customers.

Every wholesale and partner customer should be analyzed by package. What is the historical purchase record of each package for this customer? What are the strengths and opportunities of this customer? You and your team will have a certain judgment.

Each month, the most clear thing is: decompose the target to each person, and what is the daily target? If a salesperson cannot achieve the daily target, how to roll it into the remaining working days? Targets are not for dividing but for achieving. So when decomposing targets, you should discuss with the salesperson the basic methods and time points to achieve the target.

Time points are very important. If the expected result is not achieved by the time point, that is the risk of the salesperson, and you must take immediate action, rather than waiting until things have deteriorated and you are the last to know. The difference between good and bad managers lies in prediction, the ability to control results, and the ability to control outcomes. Controlling outcomes lies in key time points, following up on indicators or projects at specific time nodes.

Tracking targets is not just asking for data and passively accepting the result. You need to find the story behind the data: what affected the result? Is it a mindset issue? Is it a price system issue? Is it an operation or execution issue? Or is it a distributor selection and management issue? Here is a clear reminder: it is strictly forbidden for county salespeople to invest in or become distributors themselves.

Otherwise, your frontline team will form a game of confrontation with management. Salespeople know very well when the company's profits are most favorable, and they know the company's pulse. If such a situation forms, your management is ineffective. Your management will be very passive. So, you should check whether similar situations exist in your area, and if there are problems, correct them immediately.

-03- Reports Should Be Precise, Not Numerous After the basic actions in point 2, the next step is report management, or data-driven management. Managing a sales team without reports is impossible. Not only should you have reports, but it is important to know how to interpret and fully utilize them.

Basic management reports: sales volume report, key packages, new products, warehouse inventory report, project follow-up report.

Some reports are analytical and not suitable for daily management; some are true management tracking reports. We should know which reports are most helpful for our daily management. Reports should be precise, not numerous. Take time each day to read them carefully; being able to quickly spot problems is a capability.

The sales progress report only takes one minute; its purpose is to understand the progress of each unit's sales achievement.

The daily package report should be read carefully and analyzed. You need to understand the daily progress of each salesperson's key packages.

For lagging sales units, you need to further drill down to the customer level from Margin Minder, not just the package or channel level. The first level (package, channel) is the phenomenon; the second level (customer package analysis) is the root cause. From the customer level, you can understand the efficiency, communication, and service of our business.

From the package sales report, you understand the overall progress of the operating unit and the progress by package, and you understand the current situation of the target unit, thus grasping the overall situation of the region. Next, the report you need to read carefully is the project progress report. If a team fails to achieve sales, there will be various reasons, but the level of project implementation reflects the team's attitude and willingness to execute basics.

The other two reports a regional manager needs to understand daily are: regional inventory report and cold drink equipment report. Each report only takes one minute.

The purpose of understanding the regional inventory report is to understand the age and freshness of products in the regional warehouse. First, it gives you a sense of the deviation in your ordering plan; second, it helps you see if there are products older than three months in the regional warehouse, especially for C-category products.

Once you predict that a product may have sales problems in the future, you need to take immediate action (write a plan) and place it in fast-moving outlets and channel outlets for sale. Taking immediate action is more economical and cost-saving than waiting for near-expiry and then doing low-price promotions. Each region is assessed on utilization; improper handling of near-expiry products will affect your region's expenses.

The cold drink equipment report helps you understand the usage of equipment assets in the region during the current period. Are there recent freezer returns? Freezers needing repair? Which need refurbishment? Which need scrapping? These actions will affect your freezer management indicators.

The above three points are key actions that regional managers need to focus on in regional management. They belong to the sales operation level and are directly related to current sales achievement. Gradually implement them into daily management actions and gradually improve the regional manager's management capability. At the same time, you should know that your attitude towards daily management will directly affect the degree to which you manage and solve regional problems; your attitude towards daily management is more important than whether you manage the region perfectly.

One hand grasps the current, the other grasps the future; grasp both, and both must be firm.

The above three points have a relatively large effect on achieving current results. So, as a regional manager, how do you plan for the future business of your management area? Which actions are the source of living water? We will continue discussing this in a later article.

Source: 老章说说 (ID: gh_f3fc2377ca20)