Only a few enterprises and individuals can lead the future of business; the vast majority can only be led. Even so, how can we seize the future of business from being led? Let's look at a case from the book "From Trends to Action: New Business Ecology + Enterprise Transformation and Change in the Next Decade": a third-tier market distributor uses business technology to carry out transformation in the mobile Internet era.
In our previous marketing organizations and channel systems, there were mountains upon mountains.
We wanted to know the channel distribution, terminal sell-through, promoter attendance, competitive situation, and the status of distributors and secondary wholesalers in the Wuhan office of Hubei Province in the Central China region. It was difficult because between us and the Wuhan market, there were layers such as the Central China region and Hubei Province. The market information reported by managers at these levels to us was mostly obtained through the reports of the Wuhan office head, who in turn received some local market information from subordinates and channel partners.
Layer by layer of reporting and feedback, affected by the "communication funnel," real and effective information decreased layer by layer; affected by "departmental interests" and the workplace "unspoken rule" of "reporting good news but not bad," another layer of information was filtered or blocked.
In traditional marketing organization operations, senior managers, in addition to combining sales reports, their own market visits, or limited information learned from subordinates' reports, often had to rely more on "deciding and acting according to what subordinates say," and by cutting the requested staffing from 5 to 2 people in various regional markets and offices, or cutting a requested promotional expense from 2,000 yuan to 1,500 yuan, to exercise their rights as senior managers.
Now, Li Zhengquan wants to remind everyone: if you are still doing this without change, you have already been labeled "traditional," "old-fashioned," or even "outdated." Because the tools and technologies of the mobile Internet era have and are making our control over the information of our own marketing organizations and channel teams, as well as the management decisions based on this, increasingly transparent and more scientific and reasonable.
In recent years, more and more enterprises (including upstream manufacturers, brand operators, and distributors) have begun to use mobile sales management software based on mobile phones to control their marketing teams and transparently grasp the daily operations and management of the market and sales aspects. In the process of using it, some enterprises' marketing organizations have even been directly promoted to change.
Here, I take distributor Boss Liang as an example. Boss Liang is a distributor in Guangyuan City, Sichuan Province, for Liby Group (a leading Chinese daily chemical enterprise, with leading positions in laundry powder, dishwashing liquid, laundry detergent, laundry soap, and other categories) and our client Hengan Group (the largest domestic manufacturer of household paper and maternal and child hygiene products). Among them, the annual sales of Hengan Group's brands such as Space 7, Anerle, and Xinxiangyin alone amount to 20 million yuan.
When I met Boss Liang, he complained a lot to Li Zhengquan, talked about many confusions, and also mentioned some changes. Among them, one point is very typical in almost all enterprises. That is, he didn't know whether his salespeople went out every day to work according to the prescribed visit routes, how many terminal stores they visited, how many SKUs they distributed in each store, or how promotions such as special prices were executed in each store... In daily sales processes and standardized sales behaviors, there were many management black holes that left people "in the dark."
To improve human efficiency and strengthen the implementation of market cultivation, he spent more than 100,000 yuan to introduce a mobile ordering system from a company in Shanghai. This system included functions such as distribution tracking, order acquisition and real-time backend transmission, promotion execution tracking, real-time store visits and order volume ranking, and GPS positioning. He also equipped each of his more than 20 salespeople with a mobile phone with the system installed and a monthly data plan.
Since using the mobile ordering system, Boss Liang's company's marketing organization has undergone profound changes:
First, salespeople have become "white-collar"—previously, salespeople had to take orders, do accounting, collect payments, deliver goods, and move goods, doing everything; now they are freed from tedious work, only needing to take orders in the front, while the delivery and moving of goods are handled by drivers following behind based on the order data transmitted in real time to the backend;
Second, drivers have become "salespeople"—the two vehicles and two drivers responsible for Hengan Group's delivery business previously had fixed salaries; now they receive bonuses and commissions, 80 yuan for every 10,000 yuan of goods delivered, and an additional 100 yuan for making displays;
Third, backend warehouse staff have become "pickers and packers"—based on the orders transmitted back, warehouse staff cut boxes, pick, pack, mark customer orders, and prepare orders as soon as possible;
Fourth, team interests are bound together—he only keeps 6% of the profit, and the portion exceeding 6% is shared with his business team, making them partners.
Since Boss Liang used the mobile ordering system and carried out the corresponding marketing organization changes, the visit rate of salespeople has increased: previously, each salesperson visited five or six stores a day; now they visit more than 20 stores a day. With more customers, more product samples, and more orders; order fulfillment rate and delivery timeliness have also improved.
Equally important, sales management has become transparent.
Whether salespeople carry out visit work according to routes every day, when they arrive at and leave a certain customer, how many stores each has visited and how many orders they have taken at a certain time, the shipment volume of various brands, categories, and single products, and the execution of terminal prices... Boss Liang can grasp the real-time situation through PC or mobile according to his authority, rather than only through reports from business managers or team leaders; he or his business managers can also take corresponding follow-up management actions in the first time based on the real-time situation.
Look, this is just the transformation of an ordinary distributor in this era.
For our other enterprises, large or small, the technologies, tools, and new ideas and methods accompanying the mobile Internet era will inevitably make previously uncontrollable sales behaviors and processes transparent, real-time checkable, and controllable; they will inevitably enable a company's chairman, general manager, or marketing director, even without shortening organizational levels, to cross the barriers of intermediate levels, and as long as they want, they can check and transparently control the most first-hand information from the most remote markets at any time and anywhere.
When organizations with shortened levels meet mobile Internet-era sales management tools, this will be even more the case. Although it is not "everything is under control."
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