This year, while providing channel empowerment consulting for two category-leading companies, I gained many insights. Let's first discuss the creation of core key accounts. I define core key accounts based on three dimensions: category capacity, brand sales share, and channel attributes. For example, a brand's instant noodles define a key account as an urban supermarket, college, or core township store with monthly instant noodle sales of at least 50,000 yuan and a brand share of at least 15% of that capacity. Many people advocate that supermarket business is declining and foot traffic is decreasing, suggesting a shift in focus, but they are mistaken. Traditional brand distributors must continue to value supermarkets, which are my core key accounts. Next, let's discuss the essential skills for building core key accounts: Three Transformations + Three Efficiencies.

The Three Transformations of Core Key Accounts

The Three Transformations include: terminal mediaization, sales communication, and PR implementation.

1. Terminal Mediaization — The basic action is to build brand image at the terminal, relying on core key accounts to implement brand communication strategies. The core is to transfer the brand's central communication elements to the channel, strengthening both brand competitiveness and channel competitiveness. Many distributors think brand communication is the brand owner's job, but that was the view fifteen years ago. At that time, the market environment was simpler; brand owners could rely on mainstream media like CCTV's "big喇叭" and a few large consumer interaction events to complete the consumer awareness loop. But times have changed: media fragmentation and even "dust-ization" have scattered consumer attention, and in the era of shrinking volume and intense competition, countless brand media bombardments have created "information cocoons." It is increasingly difficult for brands to penetrate consumers' minds; relying solely on brand owners' strategies cannot form an effective synergy. Distributors must take on the brand's communication value. Distributors should do at least two things:

First, local brand communication, such as event marketing and cross-border marketing, to facilitate offline interaction between the brand and consumers.

Second, undertake the brand owner's offline media communication construction, such as turning their valuable outlets into brand image terminals (flagship, diamond, gold terminals) to stimulate consumers' "forgetful" nerves.

2. Sales Communication — The core actions are guided display, competitive display, vividness, and scene construction, making every purchase a brand experience or infusion process.

What is guided display?

Simply put, it reduces the time consumers spend making purchase decisions at the shelf, quickly presenting the product's ability to meet user needs to hesitant consumers. This requires brand owners to guide the design, and distributor teams to execute.

What is competitive display?

It highlights the unique features of differentiated products, showing advantages compared to main competitors, especially in areas where the brand is weak. How to convert competitor traffic into our own competitive advantage is a key issue for distributor display.

As for vividness and scene construction, I won't elaborate here.

3. PR Implementation — Consumer education, tasting experiences, etc. For sales promotion, I suggest focusing on tasting experience effectiveness and establishing standardized tasting experience processes. Many distributors think this is the brand owner's job; these views need to change. Also, pay attention to the organization of promoters, and how to differentiate and improve the efficiency of shopping guides (full-time, part-time, partner guides) to enhance the primary productivity of sales promotion, which deserves joint decision-making by manufacturers and distributors.

Here, I must emphasize the value of shopping guides. For example, if a competitor invests heavily in a high-capacity outlet, securing first positions on shelves, end caps, and floor displays, and sales are high, how do we break through? Think: Competitors' high investment is almost always squeezing at the "people find goods" level; a head-on collision is not advisable. We should compete on the "goods find people" level. Operation: Change guides from "passive interception" to "active interception." Through the three major functions of guides: product recommendation (in-store and out-of-store scanning), tasting experience (on-site sampling), and product sales (promotional selling), combined, as long as guide efficiency is high enough (interception rate > 50%), we can capture in-store share, competitors' share will inevitably decline, and their cost-effectiveness cannot sustain investment, leading to a bleak outcome.

The Three Efficiencies of Core Key Accounts

The Three Efficiencies include: sales per square meter, personnel efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.

1. Sales per Square Meter (坪效) — Adjust the proportion and position of main-selling and main-promotion product displays to increase output per unit area of shelf and floor display. What is sales per square meter? It refers to the daily sales generated per square meter of actual business area in a single store. For example, if a store has 100 square meters of business area and daily turnover of 10,000 yuan, the sales per square meter is 10,000 yuan ÷ 100 square meters = 100 yuan. If we can increase this to 110 yuan, it means a 10% increase in sales per square meter, raising total sales by 1,000 yuan for a 100-square-meter store. For FMCG distributors, sales per square meter becomes the unit output of the shelf or floor display where your products are placed. How to improve it?

First, product management: Re-examine displayed products, promptly eliminate poorly performing ones (except main-promotion products), maintain product turnover two to four times a month, replace underperformers, and plan displays based on consumer preferences so every corner generates revenue.

Second, display management: Check and organize shelf and floor displays to reduce ineffective display space. Frontline salespeople should pay attention to organizing shelf displays; clever displays can fully utilize shelf space, thereby improving sales per square meter.

2. Personnel Efficiency (人效) — Adjust the work content of shopping guides by time period to increase output per unit time. Here, personnel efficiency specifically refers to shopping guides, simply understood as daily sales per person. I see many guides just "standing stupidly" by the shelf. We should treat guides as a resource investment in core key accounts and measure their input-output ratio, not just have them give simple product or brand introductions. We should arrange guide work based on their three major functions and the foot traffic of core key accounts at different times, to effectively improve their in-store contribution, i.e., personnel efficiency.

We also need to focus on guides' sales skills and work attitude. Sales skills require continuous training, whether it's a daily 10-minute online internal training or periodic intensive training. Inability to work is the biggest obstacle to improving personnel efficiency. Work attitude should be addressed through assessment. My view is to turn management into incentives; designing a competitive salary system that motivates guides to "go all out" for performance is crucial.

3. Cost-Effectiveness (费效) — After rectifying the outlet and adding expenses, track store output. After we have done a good job with display layout and added investment in core key accounts, from an operator's perspective, we must control cost-effectiveness. Cost-effectiveness = invested expenses / store sales. To lower the cost-effectiveness ratio, either evaluate reducing expenses or find ways to increase in-store sales.

Essentially, increasing in-store sales means accelerating product turnover, and the logic of product turnover is matching consumer strategies. The core of consumer strategy is simple: customer acquisition, repurchase, and average transaction value. In plain language: guide consumers to buy; drive repeat and habitual purchases; and find ways to increase the quantity or amount of purchases. The four core points of customer acquisition are: acquisition, retention, activation, and conversion. We can elaborate on how to do customer acquisition from three perspectives: product, market, and operations.

a. Product side: Use product differentiation or new product development to achieve customer acquisition for core key accounts.

b. Market side: Cooperate with the brand owner's marketing or sales department on advertising, alliances, and market activities to meet customer acquisition targets.

c. Operations side: Cooperate with the brand owner's operations department on promotions and event planning to achieve customer acquisition.

What specifically should distributors do? I think there are three basics that must be done.

First, product and brand promotion activities, specifically cooperating with brand owners to standardize the consumer tasting experience process (materials, team, tasting, expenses).

Second, in non-mature markets, focus on customer acquisition and repurchase, continuously optimizing deep interaction with potential consumers and loyalty of wavering consumers.

Third, in mature markets, increase average transaction value, comprehensively raising consumer spending (buy more and buy more expensive).