---
title: "Deep Distribution Boosts Sales but Falls into the 'Low Human Efficiency' Trap"
description: "When a rising FMCG company adopts the 'deep distribution' model, it gains a competitive edge but inevitably falls into the 'low human efficiency' trap. How to break through? The answer lies in the cyclical changes of the industry."
author: "黄伟亮"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2025-09-14"
categories: "Distribution & Channels"
language: "en"
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original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Lu_k_0Y2rEeiRAw2_2WLSA"
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citation: "黄伟亮. “Deep Distribution Boosts Sales but Falls into the 'Low Human Efficiency' Trap.” New Distribution, 2025-09-14. https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/deep-distribution-boosts-sales-but-falls-into-the-low-human-efficiency-t-f6fdf0ee/"
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---

# Deep Distribution Boosts Sales but Falls into the 'Low Human Efficiency' Trap

> When a rising FMCG company adopts the 'deep distribution' model, it gains a competitive edge but inevitably falls into the 'low human efficiency' trap. How to break through? The answer lies in the cyclical changes of the industry.

**Preface:**
When a rising FMCG company chooses the "deep distribution" model, it will be like adding wings to a tiger, but it is also destined to fall into the trap of "low human efficiency." One thought leads to heaven, another to hell. How to break the deadlock? The answer lies in the laws of industry cycle changes!

**The deep distribution model determines that the FMCG industry is long-term trapped in the "low human efficiency" trap.**

First, let's look at the core characteristics of the deep distribution model:

**1. Channel下沉 (Channel sinking):** The sales network needs to achieve multi-level, comprehensive coverage from first- and second-tier cities to township markets.

**2. Manufacturer-dealer collaboration:** Brand owners and dealers work as partners, requiring extensive communication and coordination in frontline sales operations.

**3. Intensive sales:** The FMCG industry has numerous, densely distributed retail outlets. Additionally, products are consumed frequently, requiring frequent replenishment and sales.

**4. Terminal is king:** FMCG products have an "impulse buying" nature, so brand owners need to invest heavily in terminal store display and merchandising to accelerate product sell-through.

From the analysis of the above characteristics of the deep distribution model, it is not difficult to see that the FMCG industry requires a large number of sales personnel, and they need to do a lot of repetitive work every day. To better quantify the work of sales personnel, the following figure lists the typical daily work items of a salesperson and a sales supervisor as examples.

**"Low human efficiency output" has always been a pain point in the industry.** From the review of the daily work of frontline sales and managers, their work has characteristics of **complexity, repetitiveness, multi-party communication, and fragmentation.**

As the saying goes: "A thousand threads above, a single needle below." A salesperson's daily work involves tasks from multiple management departments, which often leads to frontline sales personnel being flustered, unable to prioritize, exhausted, or even resorting to "fraud."

In addition, although sales personnel do many things daily, company performance appraisals often use sales achievement as the key indicator. In the end, completing many tasks does not necessarily mean good sales performance. "Low human efficiency output" has become a dark cloud hanging over the industry.

How to complete tasks well and achieve sales targets on time? The only answer is: **improve human efficiency.**

**Breaking out of the "low human efficiency" trap through digital transformation**

First, let's look at the formula for human efficiency: **Human efficiency = per capita input / per capita output.** Here, **per capita output** usually refers to per capita sales or profit. **Per capita input** refers to the total per capita cost invested by the enterprise.

Human efficiency is a core indicator for measuring the input-output efficiency of human resources. It is essentially a quantitative assessment of the ability to "convert labor costs into corporate benefits" and is a key indicator for measuring team combat effectiveness and organizational operational efficiency.

"Human efficiency improvement" is achieved through channel digitalization. How is it done? Channel digitalization focuses on two directions for human efficiency improvement: **collaborative efficiency improvement and individual work efficiency improvement.**

**I. Collaborative efficiency improvement:**

It is reflected in three aspects: sales superior-subordinate collaboration, manufacturer-dealer collaboration, and business upstream-downstream collaboration. Through the construction of channel digital systems such as SFA and DMS, the transparency of channel information is improved, and the flow speed of information in each channel link is accelerated, directly promoting the improvement of collaborative efficiency.

**II. Individual work efficiency improvement:**

The daily work of salespeople involves five core work scenarios: customer management, visit management, order sales, information collection, expense management, and equipment management.

The construction of the SFA system mainly focuses on the above five core work scenarios. Through process optimization, business online, or AI empowerment in various tasks, it can effectively shorten the operation time of salespeople on individual items and improve personal work efficiency.

**The essence of digital transformation is to enjoy the cycle dividend**

From historical experience, it is not difficult to see that digital transformation follows two lines.

One line is the industry cycle pain points. Each industry has different development stages, and the market environment faced at different stages is different, so the transformation pain points corresponding to each stage are also different.

The other line is the commercial application of new technologies. New technologies need a gradual process from generation to commercial application.

New technologies and new industry trends are mutually reinforcing and promoting.

In addition, from the perspective of market competition, when industry development enters a new cycle, enterprises that can take the lead in using new technologies to solve industry pain points often get the first wave of "transformation dividends," and the digital transformation of human efficiency management also follows this rule.

**Looking at the digital transformation of "human efficiency management" from the three stages of industry development**

The digital transformation of "human efficiency management" in the FMCG industry is not only an inevitable call of the new industry trend at a certain stage but also the empowerment of technological innovation. Next, we will divide the development of the FMCG industry into three stages to analyze the industry background, technological innovation, and characteristics of digital transformation of human efficiency management in each stage.

**Stage 1: "Rapid growth period"**

From the **industry background**, with the rapid growth of the national economy, the FMCG market share has also been growing rapidly every year. To "expand territory," enterprises rapidly expand the scale of sales personnel. The resulting difficulty in personnel management and work collaboration has also increased geometrically.

From the **technology background**, the rapid popularization of mobile internet has made mobile office a reality. In this stage, the digital work of "human efficiency management" mainly focuses on two points:

> 1. "Online process management": Core processes such as personnel management, customer management, route management, expense management, order management, and performance management are realized online, which simplifies a large amount of paper-based work and greatly improves personal work and team collaboration efficiency.
>
> 2. "Standardization of work standards": The terminal operation standard centered on the "eight-step visit" is solidified in the visit task form, which can not only reduce a lot of sales coaching work but also standardize operation specifications and ensure the quality of terminal merchandising work. This raises the lower limit of the overall sales team's work.

**Stage 2: "Growth slowdown period"**

In this cycle, **in terms of industry background**, with the slowdown of economic growth and the increasing satisfaction of market demand, the growth of the FMCG industry has also begun to slow down.

At this time, how to improve the efficiency of sales personnel and mobilize their enthusiasm has become a problem that most enterprises need to consider.

In addition, **in terms of technological innovation**, AI technology mainly based on image recognition has begun to be commercialized on a large scale, with great advantages in cost and accuracy.

**1. "AI empowerment for efficiency":** AI image recognition technology is applied in the following business scenarios:

> 1. AI display review: Through AI image recognition, it assists manual judgment of whether the display meets standards, improving the efficiency of display verification and reimbursement.
>
> 2. AI product recognition: Through AI recognition of product SKUs and quantities, it can efficiently count the distribution of this product and competing products, replacing manual statistics.
>
> 3. AI storefront recognition: Through AI recognition of storefront signs, it is used for customer file deduplication on the one hand, and on the other hand, it reduces the phenomenon of storefront photo fraud, reducing manual inspection costs.

**2. "Refined incentives":** The performance management model for sales personnel shows the following characteristics:

**1. Quantitative incentives:** This refers to splitting the process indicators and result indicators of sales personnel into each specific task, refining the assessment granularity, and breaking the whole into parts.

**2. Timely incentives:** Breaking the past assessment cycle based on months, quarters, and years, instead using a certain operation task as the assessment unit, and after completion, the corresponding reward can be issued. For example, after completing a new customer and passing the review, a red packet reward can be obtained.

**3. Proactive incentives:** Compared with the past "high-pressure" passive assessment for sales personnel, proactive assessment pays more attention to mobilizing the work initiative of sales personnel. Therefore, when designing the incentive mechanism, more attention is paid to "fun" and "interactivity," such as introducing "points redemption ranking" and "team PK" forms.

**Stage 3: "Intensified stock competition"**

This stage is the cycle we are currently experiencing.

From the **industry background**, on the one hand, the growth rate of the FMCG market size has further slowed down, entering the era of "intensified stock competition."

On the other hand, impacted by diversified channels such as online channels, discount stores, community group buying, and instant retail, the role transformation of channel dealers is urgent, and deep distribution is no longer a "panacea." This makes the topic of "human efficiency management" more urgent and complex.

From the **technological innovation**, the commercial application of generative AI is becoming increasingly mature, which can spark more ideas in improving human efficiency.

Based on the above industry background and technological innovation trends, let's try to summarize and look forward to the digital transformation of "human efficiency management" in this stage:

**1. "AI deep empowerment":** Generative AI has natural advantages in data analysis, knowledge summarization, image and video generation, giving rise to the implementation of some new application scenarios.

For example: AI sales coach, providing professional training and guidance to new salespeople; intelligent analysis assistant, automatically generating summary reports based on daily sales data. From the current application scenarios, the benefits of generative AI empowering sales are limited, and the future output efficiency needs further observation.

**2. "Data-driven management":** From the analysis of current industry trends, although the share of traditional offline channels is being continuously eroded, it will not disappear and remains the main battlefield for top brand owners. However, the current channel dealers are forced to transform due to the situation, which will inevitably bring great trouble to brand owners' "deep cultivation of terminals."

The role that will undertake this task in the future is unknown, but it is foreseeable that in the digital transformation of "human efficiency management," "data-driven management" is a clear direction. It may have the following characteristics:

> 1. Focus on high-quality terminal operations, reduce the breadth of traditional customer coverage, and increase the depth of customer coverage. Rely on customer portraits to identify high-quality terminals and provide precise services.
>
> 2. Data-driven task management: The issuance of sales tasks such as visits, distribution, replenishment, and expense investment relies on data analysis and reduces dependence on personal subjective experience. It is likely that in the future, the management of frontline sales personnel will be more flat, with headquarters AI robots assigning specific tasks.

**Summary**

In summary, the digital transformation story of "human efficiency improvement" in the FMCG industry has been happening all along. Each stage's transformation is a product of industry trends combined with technological innovation. Participants will experience the pain of cycle transformation, feel confused, and be eager to make choices and seek change.

On the road of "human efficiency management," no matter how it changes, I think our vision should be "to empower management through tools and stimulate people's goodness," not "to materialize and instrumentalize people."


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## Citation metadata

- Publisher: New Distribution
- Author: 黄伟亮
- Published: 2025-09-14
- Canonical: https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/deep-distribution-boosts-sales-but-falls-into-the-low-human-efficiency-t-f6fdf0ee/
- Original source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Lu_k_0Y2rEeiRAw2_2WLSA

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Contact: zhaobo258@gmail.com · +86 158 5481 7671