Many distributors feel that business has become increasingly difficult in recent years, with rising labor costs and products becoming harder to sell day by day. From an industry trend perspective, they have to face industry transformation. Efficiency improvements brought by new technologies and precise distribution under big data are the mainstream trends for intermediaries' future informatization. Traditional distributors who do not quickly adapt and embrace these changes will soon be eliminated by the times.

Of course, facing this situation, many distributors across the country have already begun trying to transform into B2B. But before doing B2B, I think distributors must consider a question: How high is your own level of informatization? Do you use financial, inventory, and sales management software in your business operations? Do you value the importance of data? Do you monitor daily operations through various reports? Have you separated sales and delivery? Have you carried out shareholding reform of the company? If a lot of basic work has not been completed and sales scale has not reached 20 million yuan or more, then my suggestion to distributors is: you can try SaaS products represented by Waiqin 365, solve the problems I raised above, and then it is not too late to do B2B.

Born in the mobile internet era, Waiqin 365 has achieved remarkable results in mobile CRM and SFA (Sales Force Automation). Since its inception, it has provided cloud products and services to more than 200,000 enterprises, including Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi, Chateau, Changyu, Sinochem Fertilizer, Kaimi, Guizhou Bailing, and other leading national and global groups and listed companies. The "one chart, two tables, six fixes" on the mobile end of Waiqin 365, and the enterprise-specific "eight-step visit" have become benchmarks and standard configurations for offline sales management, properly solving various management difficulties of offline sales personnel.

Waiqin 365's exploration of offline sales management has not stopped. After continuously understanding the industry and customer needs, Waiqin 365 launched the "Trade Edition" product for offline sales distributors and the "Distribution Edition" product for brand owners.

Trade Edition + Distribution Edition: Solve Deep Pain Points of Offline Sales

For distributors in offline sales, in addition to managing sales personnel visits and other behaviors, they also hope to achieve more real-time and precise sales work at customer sites. Currently, the informatization tools of traditional distributors are mostly limited to inventory systems used only within the company, which are outdated and unable to meet needs. Using Waiqin 365's "Trade Edition" allows sales personnel to directly place orders, check company inventory, and execute company promotional activities during customer visits. This not only improves the efficiency of on-site work but also saves the company several employees dedicated to order entry, reducing costs. In the mobile internet era, using mobile phones as the carrier and the "Trade Edition" as a tool is sufficient to meet the needs of distributors, helping them increase revenue and reduce costs, and improve offline sales efficiency.

For brand manufacturers, offline distribution channels typically include larger agents/distributors, small and medium-sized wholesalers, and special channels; sales terminals generally include direct-operated and chain terminal stores, KA supermarkets, mom-and-pop stores, restaurants, enterprises and institutions, etc. The complex and diverse distribution levels bring many management difficulties to enterprises. If not managed well, enterprises cannot deeply understand the channels, cannot accurately grasp the flow of commerce, leading to inventory backlog and shortages in channels and terminal stores, distributors engaging in cross-regional selling, price undercutting or raising, and promotional expenses not reaching terminals directly. Waiqin 365's "Distribution Edition" introduces the industry-advanced DMS (Distributor Management System), and together with the SFA module, it forms a complete system from sales behavior automation to distribution management. The "Distribution Edition" will help brand owners grasp the inventory status of all levels of channels in real time, and understand the sell-through situation of terminal stores in real time, thereby enabling brand owners to gain insights into product flow, direction, and speed data, improving sales efficiency and decision-making capabilities.

Trend: Industry-Deep CRM Will Become a Necessity

The new normal of the economy has brought about a comprehensive upgrade of consumption structure. Enterprise offline sales have also entered a new development stage of personalization, diversification, and variety with the upgrade of consumption structure. More and more new categories, new brands, and new products are entering the market, bringing many new growth points. However, with faster market changes, enterprises also need faster market response capabilities to match. Traditional CRM has completely fallen behind the development speed of the mobile internet era, unable to solve the ever-changing pain points of today's enterprises, and even unable to be implemented within enterprises. The problems of traditional CRM are becoming increasingly prominent:

  • It is only a tool for internal recording and forecasting, unable to help enterprises improve sales efficiency and performance; it cannot understand the pain points of the customer's industry, nor solve the customer's actual problems;
  • OP (On-premise deployment) accounts for the vast majority, with high costs in terms of money and time, and products cannot maintain updates and iterations. It is often found that within less than 2 years, the product becomes outdated by an era;
  • It does not pay attention to mobile experience, and some even lack a mobile version, causing complaints from frontline sales personnel.

Under the impact of the internet on traditional industries, for enterprises themselves, relying on production capacity, relationships, or advertising to determine sales has become history. In today's environment, efficient management is the foundation for long-term success. Sales management is the core of enterprises' pursuit of profit, affecting key issues such as what to produce, when to produce, how much to produce, what to purchase, how much to purchase, where to purchase, what to ship, how much to ship, and where to ship. Superficial CRM will become increasingly useless. Enterprises need CRM products that better understand business, go deeper into business, and are more aligned with practice.

Following the Trend: Deep Industry Focus Will Achieve Great Results

For enterprise offline sales management, managing the sales team, orders, inventory, and distribution channels are intertwined and inseparable. Currently, many domestic CRM products emphasize generalization and simplification too much. In fact, products that only scratch the surface cannot meet the actual needs of customers. Waiqin 365 chooses to conduct in-depth research on the industry, essentially to solve customer problems. Waiqin 365's "Trade Edition" and "Distribution Edition" enable enterprise sales personnel to complete various sales actions more efficiently within more standardized visit steps. They not only help enterprises manage people and customers but also manage products, orders, and inventory, making sales work more efficient and enterprise sales more controllable.

In addition, Waiqin 365, based on SaaS, has completely reduced the cost of trying management software for enterprises and has become a model of mobile CRM today:

  • Developed with SaaS technology, real-time deployment and use, immediate iteration and upgrade, solving various problems of traditional software such as high cost, difficult implementation, complex use, and slow iteration;
  • The platform provides rich interfaces, enabling integration with existing ERP and other systems, ensuring data synchronization and accuracy;
  • The natively developed mobile app has strong compatibility, comfortable experience, and convenient upgrades.

After all, products are used by "people." If management can implement them easily and execution layers can use them skillfully, then it is a top-quality product.

In addition to serving SMB (Small and Medium-sized Business) customers, Waiqin 365 can also serve high-quality large customers. Waiqin 365 already has a group of top domestic and international enterprise customers. High-quality customers give Waiqin 365 a deeper understanding of the industry, insight into the multi-level distribution management model of "brand owner - distributor - store" in offline sales, and a deep understanding of industry pain points and difficulties, thus possessing profound "internal skills." Relying on the internet, Waiqin 365 helps brand owners and distributors connect upstream and downstream, providing global control and intelligent decision support for enterprise sales—which channels contribute the most to corporate profits? What types of terminals should different categories match? Which categories still have room to grow in terminals? Which core terminals are about to be lost or have already been occupied by competitors? In which regions do new products have the highest acceptance? What types of strategies are more conducive to new product distribution? ... From small and medium-sized distributors to large and group brand owners, Waiqin 365 brings visible efficiency improvements to customers every day.

"Sales management is the comprehensive management of product flow, information flow, and capital flow during the sales process, but whether it is product flow or capital flow, both require precise support from information flow," said Liu Zhao, CEO of Waiqin 365. "Today's Waiqin 365 has achieved a complete system for offline sales management. Through continuous accumulation in cloud computing and big data, we provide enterprises with more efficient, transparent, and symmetrical information flow, improve sales efficiency, and help customers succeed."

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