---
title: "Channel First! Make a City Plan with a Handle!"
description: "After the Spring Festival, many city managers find their annual plans have already failed. This article argues that the best time to make an annual plan is after the holiday, and that plans should be channel-centric, with detailed rolling plans and follow-up actions to ensure execution."
author: "许翔"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2022-02-21"
language: "en"
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---

# Channel First! Make a City Plan with a Handle!

> After the Spring Festival, many city managers find their annual plans have already failed. This article argues that the best time to make an annual plan is after the holiday, and that plans should be channel-centric, with detailed rolling plans and follow-up actions to ensure execution.

**After returning to the city for Spring Festival, I've gained three pounds; my mind is dull, and my body is lazy. Orders and payments are what matter! City plan? It's already gathering dust.** This is the reality! For grassroots city managers, most annual plans die after the Spring Festival...

**When to make the annual plan?**

Generally, most frontline city managers start working on the next year's annual plan in Q4. Due to busy work and heavy targets, many find it hard to spend much time on this routine paperwork that repeats every year.

Procrastination is the norm, and most end up pulling all-nighters at the end of the year to submit before the deadline. Then, after dealing with the year-end rush, they face the high-pressure targets of the new year's "good start" (Q1 sales push), leaving little energy for executing the annual plan! With the daily grind of fighting for orders, January flies by, and then it's Spring Festival! Some go home, some travel, eating, sleeping, playing cards, and gaming all day...

When they return after the holiday and open their computers to get back to work, they find a folder called "Annual City Plan"...

So, we shouldn't let frontline city managers repeat this ineffective cycle! Actually, the best time to make the city annual plan is right after the Spring Festival holiday!

First, it avoids the distraction of the peak sales season.

Second, after returning to work in February, there's more controllable time to truly think and write.

Third, a plan made in February and executed from March 1st is more practical for the frontline sales team, since January and February are mostly about the CNY push, and most new year's distribution and activation work starts in March.

**The Dead End of Annual Plans**

More and more city managers complain that PPTs are getting longer and fancier, but further from actual market operations. We should refuse ineffective involution.

**Don't make annual plans that are just for show and irrelevant; don't make plans that are data-stuffed but hard to implement; don't make plans that are all-encompassing but detached from daily work.** The purpose of a city plan is for business and growth! Any data or pages not related to growth can be omitted, and many seemingly reasonable parts (like third-party data on market share and capacity) can be streamlined or deleted. Does a city manager managing a prefecture-level city really need a detailed interpretation of market share?

The reality is that grassroots city managers struggle to interpret third-party data like Nielsen; the counting logic and sampling scope don't correlate well with their daily dealer channels.

**The more painful truth is that if your brand's market share is low, instead of analyzing every basis point's rise and fall, it's better to sell a few more boxes at key outlets.** Does a city manager managing a prefecture-level city really need to understand population composition and consumption power?

The reality is that for most manufacturer brands, when market share is below 50%, population composition, growth, and per capita disposable income have little impact on most FMCG products. Our products are often just the price of a cup of coffee or milk tea, so don't waste effort dragging in economic data to spin your wheels. Does a city manager managing a prefecture-level city really need to analyze the market from all 4P dimensions?

The reality is that city plans are getting longer, starting from product performance, promotion results, channel execution—each dimension seems necessary, but when combined, you end up confusing yourself...

Because there are too many angles to consider, you lose the overall handle for implementation.

**Frontline city managers should make annual plans channel-centric**

There's a consensus in the industry: among the 4Ps of FMCG sales, only "Place" (channel) is uncontrollable; the other three are controllable!

**"Product"** is the starting point and carrier of every company, highly autonomous; frontline city managers just need to sell.

**"Price"** is the lifeline of every company; profitability and survival depend on pricing; frontline city managers just need to sell.

**"Promotion"** efficiency is the engine for sustained growth; frontline city managers mostly just execute. In today's market, where channels are constantly splitting, iterating, restructuring, and upgrading, even neighboring markets can have vastly different channel structures. This requires every frontline city manager to fully observe, analyze, think, operate, and control!

**Only by being channel-centric can product selection, pricing, and promotion be more precise and efficient!** From hypermarkets, supermarkets, BC stores, traditional grocery stores, convenience stores, wholesalers, special channels, specialty stores, to platform e-commerce, home delivery e-commerce, content e-commerce, live-stream e-commerce, ERTM, and community group buying, each city's channel composition is different;

Each channel's development stage, business weight, capability match, operational difficulty, and credit rating also vary. So building a 4P strategy for each channel based on channel-centricity is the most realistic and efficient business plan today.

**Channel Guidance Map for the Annual Plan**

To make it easier to understand, let's take an ordinary prefecture-level city as an example. The manager in charge doesn't need to look at AC Nielsen's provincial market share data, because that data has little to do with the prefecture-level city under their jurisdiction.

What they should focus on is the city's overall business distribution (What's the share of hypermarkets? What's the share of community group buying? Which channels are most important? Which channels will grow fastest next year? What's the business share of major competitors in each important and high-expectation channel?) Then make detailed plans for the strategic key channels most worth "attacking."

For example, in the chart above, although the expected growth for supermarkets next year is slightly negative, because supermarkets account for 25% of the local category business, and some will transform into membership warehouse stores next year, to capture the business share after transformation, supermarkets are designated as the strategic key channel for 2022! Then, present the detailed plan for this channel via PPT or Excel. To ensure practical implementation, the author suggests not making the local supermarket plan too "long-term"!

It's best to follow the retailers' promotion calendars, focusing on M+2 (this month, next month, and the month after) detailed product selection, pricing, and promotions. This approach rolls forward monthly, producing tangible results while ensuring dynamic consistency in channel strategy.

*Note: In the book "FMCG Regional/City Manager Omni-channel Management" published in December 2021, the author has detailed practical tactics for each major channel from the perspective of grassroots city managers. Interested peers can refer to the relevant chapters.*

**Follow-up Actions to Prevent the Plan from Dying**

The previous section emphasized that to truly implement a business plan, the "annual" mindset is just a directional guide; more importantly, follow the channel's customer rhythm to make detailed action plans and integrate them into every workday's battle. Why does the author deliberately downplay the "annual" mindset? Because annual plans are too easy to die; often, making a plan doesn't mean the start, but the end! To prevent the plan from becoming a joke, we must seriously do several follow-up actions:

**Action 1:** The first month of the annual plan is crucial. Set small, easily achievable goals for the first month. After the first month, be sure to review, celebrate the first month's success with the team, and make the team "love" the annual plan.

**Action 2:** All market inspection routes and KPIs must strictly follow the city annual plan. Avoid "one set for planning, another for checking." Maintain consistency in all execution and inspection in the city market.

**Action 3:** Keep a close eye on the M+2 channel detail plan. Use the strategic guidance for the remaining 10 months to drive rolling plans every two months, integrating them into daily morning meetings and weekly meetings to ensure daily actions fully serve channel strategy and growth goals.

**Action 4:** At the end of each month, the city manager, as the first responsible person, should not only report progress upward but also add a "downward report."

That is, the city manager should explain the monthly progress of the city plan to their team, which can provide reverse supervision and motivation. After all, subordinates know best what their boss is doing daily; it's hard to fool them... Finally, I want to remind frontline city managers: there's no perfect annual plan; as long as you persist, you'll beat most competitors because they tend to give up. Persistence doesn't guarantee victory, but giving up halfway guarantees failure!

*PS: The author, Mr. Xu Xiang, will be a speaker at the 2022 (7th) China FMCG Channel Innovation Conference held by New Distribution during the National Sugar and Wine Fair in Chengdu, Sichuan, from March 18-20. He will share more practical content on omni-channel operations management. Interested friends, don't miss it!*

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