These days, you don't know the cost of fuel until you're in charge, and you don't know how hard life is until you try it yourself. It's like the buyer show and seller show of the same dress on Taobao: looking at others wearing it, they look ethereal, but when you buy it and put it on, oh my! You instantly go from school beauty to laughingstock.

The same goes for being a distributor. Watching others get a distribution right, open a small shop, and suddenly have customers coming like clouds and goods turning over like wheels, changing houses in one year, cars in two, and by three years, they've changed their whole world. Then you think, you're not stupid, not clumsy, not lazy, so you follow suit and open a shop, take on a brand, but in a blink, you're struggling for a year, barely surviving for two, and closing down by three.

Both are in distribution, both open stores, why is there such a big gap in business performance!?

A distributor's growth history can be roughly divided into the following six steps:

Step 1: Find a good product, choose a new category, and with the product's growth trend, start from a small store, gradually accumulating some savings. At this stage, operating cost pressure is low, and the store's survival depends entirely on the product's natural traffic. Sell as much as you can, sell as much as you want;

Step 2: Start expanding related categories, find ways to get more people to buy, and get buyers to buy more. The result of this step is often an increasing number of products;

Step 3: At a certain stage of development, you realize that just selling products isn't enough; you need to focus on store image and sell at a premium. Start upgrading store image, start choosing brand agency, and start focusing on product display. At this stage, the store's image improves, and brand awareness begins to emerge;

Step 4: When the store image improves, it actually means costs increase, requiring a certain volume to cover costs, so increasing store sales becomes a top priority. At this stage, to survive and develop, sales promotion, promotional activities, and a series of sales-driving actions are indispensable. This is what we often call moving from being a sedentary merchant to an itinerant merchant;

Step 5: After the upgraded store survives and the big store survives, ambitious distributors start thinking about replicating their success model on a large scale. Either start their own chains, franchise, or directly supply retailers. At this stage, there's already a sense of channel management;

Step 6: If you're lucky enough to become a regional power, and you start to get inflated, you'll likely have two paths: one is to extend upward, building your own factory, creating your own brand, becoming a manufacturer; the other is to seek quick money, investing, speculating in real estate, or even opening bars and buying KTVs, diversifying widely. At this point, distributors either soar to the sky or fall into hell.

At each of these steps, many distributors give up halfway, and every distributor who didn't cross that threshold has a story to tell and "back in the day" tales for future generations.

Step 1: Without good insight, you're not fit for distribution!

For entrepreneurial distributors, success depends on insight. This insight isn't just about reading people when dealing with customers, but more importantly, about observing peers and products.

Insight into peers. Many people become distributors because they see that their neighbor, Wang Laowu, was also a poor guy, but after just two years in distribution, he already looks like a big boss. Many people jump into the distribution business because of this. They don't know that his store is bustling because his brother-in-law is a powerful figure in some bureau or office; or that even if his store seems empty, he lives comfortably because he does business behind closed doors. If you also open a store for retail, you're just asking for trouble.

Insight into products. For newcomers, the most important thing is choosing which products to sell. Mature products have thin margins and fierce competition, and distributors generally can't get them easily, and even if they do, it's a near-death experience for newcomers. New products and categories have market gaps, but there are many trap products disguised as pie-in-the-sky opportunities, resurrecting in the market. Many new distributors, due to careless product selection, waste their hard-earned startup capital on such "trap products," ending up back where they started after ten years of hard work.

Step 2: Without your own cognitive system for products, you're not fit for distribution!

After surviving the life-and-death startup phase, distributors often make two types of mistakes when expanding categories. One is only pursuing high-profit, low-price products; the other is overreaching and getting burned.

Distributors who succeed initially start to gain confidence in their sales abilities. They often say, "In my store, my mouth is the brand; I say who is the brand, and they are the brand." Such distributors, if they are strong solo fighters, are most likely to become general store-type distributors, with many categories and products, but mostly low-end. As brand awareness and consumption upgrade trends emerge, these distributors either move to lower-tier markets or wait for death, picking up scraps from the mainstream market, becoming dwarfs that never grow.

Of course, there's another scenario: when expanding categories, distributors are greedy for everything, not supplementing with related categories around the successful product, but selling whatever is hot. This is a strategic blindness that many distributors easily fall into, and those who get lost in it are now six feet under.

Step 3: Without an empty-cup mindset and cooperation awareness, you're not fit for distribution!

At the stage of building brands and image, the distributor's willingness and ability to cooperate become crucial.

Looking around today, most distributors who have a place in the regional market are major or key distributors supported by enterprises. Leaning against a big tree gives you shade; without brand support, distributors not only work hard for money but also find it hard to make big money. This is why leading companies in the industry become hot commodities.

At this upgrade stage, whether a distributor can go further depends most on mindset, especially when cooperating with mature brands. Is your past success experience important? Of course! But if you choose to upgrade your image and brand, it's because relying on past business models for growth has hit a bottleneck. Since you've chosen to cooperate with formal brand enterprises, listening more, seeing more, and using other companies' experiences and methods is the lowest cost for trial and error in distributor development.

Of course, are there those bastard companies that only push inventory and don't help solve problems? Yes, there are, but when choosing to cooperate, you need to keep your eyes open, ask peers, visit the market, and check the company. Once you choose, you must go forward without hesitation. If you're timid and suspicious, you'll harm yourself and make your employees suffer.

Moreover, which company doesn't like distributors with a high degree of cooperation? Since cooperation brings support, support brings resources, and resources bring market. Distributor, why are you still wavering?

Step 4: Without a spirit of adventure and exploration, you're not fit for distribution!

With image upgrades, operating costs rise, and distributors' demand for sales volume surges. The store's natural traffic can no longer meet development needs.

From relying on a product's natural traffic and attributes to sustain a store, to going out fully armed to hunt for food, this is a difficult step for many distributors, even though everyone understands the principle of being an itinerant merchant.

Being an itinerant merchant sounds simple, but why is it so hard in practice? Essentially, it's because people have an instinct to seek benefits and avoid harm. Either the store is doing well, and you think about going further to find more foot traffic; or the store is doing poorly, and you first look for outside opportunities. First, you calculate: labor, materials, expenses, and you have to swallow your pride to beg and plead; then you see: handing out flyers, no one wants them; entering residential areas, they chase you out; finally, you hear others' success stories, which are nothing more than discounts, buy-one-get-one, and recruiting people, no magic tricks. You weigh it: high investment, high risk, uncertain returns, and you have to lose face. So you think, "Let's just do well in the store first; at worst, I won't lose my shirt. Let's wait and see, wait and see..."

Distributors who die at this step slowly kill themselves with this mindset. Although many who die here think they've tried and it didn't work, there's a huge gap between trying and actually doing. We won't discuss that here, as saying too much might seem harsh.

Step 5: Without the mindset that benefiting others is benefiting yourself, you're not fit for distribution!

Going from retailer to channel distributor, from managing your own team to managing other distributors, opening chains, franchising, or even setting up sub-distributors, is to some extent a process of replicating your success. This replication involves both mandatory promotion and consideration of other distributors' actual situations; it must consider the capacity of downstream outlets while maintaining the company's execution standards. So, distributors who excel as channel distributors are shrewd and sophisticated, the cream of the crop.

From a retailer who deals with consumers to a channel distributor who commands a following, the distributor's vision and pattern should rise to a new level, from winning alone to winning together, from self-interest to altruism. In more esoteric terms, it's a rebirth of one's outlook on life and world. The stickiness and service capability to these outlets involve not just money and profit, but also people.

The reason Lei Feng's spirit is still relevant is that in the internet age, no one can thrive alone.

Step 6: Small wealth depends on diligence, great wealth depends on fate; without an entrepreneur's destiny, you're not fit for distribution!

This point is a bit idealistic.

Not everyone needs to become a famous entrepreneur to reach the peak, and not everyone must be rich and powerful to be a winner in life. "First fate, second luck, third feng shui, fourth accumulated virtue, fifth reading"—the success of step six is somewhat idealistic. Among those distributors who extend upward in the supply chain, many are seen, but few succeed, although this goes beyond the scope of distribution; conversely, those who made their first pot of gold in distribution and then speculated in real estate or stocks, many still live comfortably today. Of course, this also goes beyond the discussion of distribution.

The success or failure of this step: if you succeed, you're the next Zhong Shanshan; if not, you just flashed briefly on the distributor path.

So, you think being a distributor is just buying and selling, that simple?

Wrong, wrong, you're all wrong!

To be a good distributor, you not only need to be good at analysis and understand products;

You also need to learn some psychology, not only to figure out others but also to know yourself;

You need not only a team spirit that endures humiliation but also an endless spirit of exploration;

You even need a spirit of universal harmony—"you're good, I'm good, everyone's good"—

Most importantly, you also need

—Fate!

—This article is dedicated to those distributors who didn't complete the Long March!

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