Click the image for details Private Enterprise Internal Management Research/Pan Wenfu Most distributors' businesses are still too superficial: planning, product mix, execution, customer management, sales promotion activities, etc., are all floating on the surface, without true sinking. Some actions that seem to sink are actually hollow, unsubstantial, and too fragile. If they encounter a competitor who works solidly, they will be defeated at once. Once they collapse, bosses will again say business is hard.
1. The Boss Starts to Float First The business is not solid, first because the boss himself starts to float. After annual sales exceed 50-60 million, bosses often become fully or semi-detached from operations, getting farther from the front line, and the frequency of personally visiting terminals decreases. Specific sales work is, of course, delegated to the business team below. It is correct and necessary to delegate specific business work to employees. However, this requires a corresponding customer management system; the system determines overall business operations, and salespeople undertake the execution modules. But the vast majority of distributor companies do not have a complete customer management system at all, directly handing customers over to salespeople.
2. The Salesperson's Floating Will salespeople focus on doing business work well? Hahahahaha—random store visits, poor service attitudes, perfunctory execution, deliberate wrongdoing, or busy selling their own private goods—.
3. The Floating of Business Actions Business actions toward terminals mainly focus on order quantity, at most reaching the display level. As for terminal-level consumer promotion actions, they are relatively rare. Of course, this is the same as the work orientation of most manufacturers' salespeople: as long as distributors buy goods, it's fine. As for the distributor's inventory pressure and actual sales situation, there's no rush.
4. Treating Retail Terminals as the End of Sales Work As long as goods enter retail terminals and are placed on shelves, it's considered done. If they don't sell well, it's because the manufacturer invests too little, the brand is weak, or the product is inferior.
In the past, when the market environment was loose, even with a rough business model, there was money to be made. But now, if you continue to float like this, you might not even have wind to drink. The distributor business has no special technical difficulty; it's just a few actions. The key is whether you can do them solidly, that is, whether related work can be concretely implemented.
From the perspective of the entire distribution channel structure, distributors are in the middle. After purchasing from upstream manufacturers, they should sink the products down, first to retail terminals, then coordinate with retail terminals to launch a series of proactive sales promotion activities toward consumers. At the same time, when conditions allow direct contact with consumers, the definition of terminals can be further sunk to the consumer level. The related work is explained as follows:
I. Basic Skills of Terminal Management Downstream retail terminals are the distributor's livelihood. Therefore, establishing a terminal management system is the basic skill of a distributor company. This management system includes:
- Definition of terminal categories
- Terminal coverage planning
- Terminal development process
- Terminal coverage map
- Classification of terminal cooperation relationships
- Classification of terminal sales characteristics
- Classification of terminal sales capabilities
- Terminal files
- Company-centralized terminal customer relationship system
- Regular cleanup of historical legacy issues
- Company's multi-line docking system with terminals (especially two-way information communication with independent customer service personnel)
- Company's electronic information release platform for terminals
- Multi-level regular visits to terminal customers
- Basic market information and data analysis services for terminal customers
- Regular customer联谊会 (social gatherings)
- Financial analysis of customer output
- Targeted investment of terminal resources
- Targeted establishment of terminal product mix
II. Value-Added Services for Terminal Management Establishing a terminal management system to ensure normal business transactions is just the basic skill. You can do it, and so can others. Next, to win terminals' attention and resource preference, differentiate from competitors, and achieve closer cooperation, you need to introduce value-added services to terminals.
Value-added services mean that on the basis of normal business cooperation, by providing hardware and software services to terminal customers, you help terminals improve business performance, optimize business structure, reduce operating costs, avoid business risks, or solve a specific current problem. In short, on top of conventional commercial profits, distributors can bring additional new benefits to terminal customers, thus forming a certain profit complementarity with conventional product sales profits, ultimately creating a dual-line or even multi-line profit output form. Common value-added service measures include:
- Cleaning and sanitizing the terminal site environment, such as overall cleaning of the cash register counter and ceiling cleaning
- Small hardware additions and repairs, such as organizing wiring, replacing light bulbs, etc.
- Adjustment and optimization of in-store display layout
- Provision of in-store personnel management techniques
- Sales skills training for store staff
- Provision of terminal business strategy plans (e.g., traffic generation methods)
- Provision of small management software (e.g., foot traffic statistics, analysis of transaction product structure)
- Measures to maintain terminal old customers (consumers)
- Development and guidance of small group purchases at terminals
III. Inventory Transfer Is Not Sales This involves the management orientation of business personnel. The conventional management orientation uses terminal purchases as the assessment yardstick. In fact, terminal purchases are only inventory transfer and do not directly form true sales. They may even cause terminal overstocking, intensifying terminal dissatisfaction with the distributor.
The assessment orientation of salespeople should be adjusted from guiding terminal purchases to helping terminals sell goods. Only by helping terminals ultimately sell products to consumers is it true sales. In specific measures, two aspects can be considered:
- For terminals with sales management systems, the actual sales data of related products can be directly exported, that is, the data of actual sales to consumers, as the basis for assessing salespeople.
- For terminals without sales data, regular terminal inventory checks can be conducted, subtracting current inventory from purchases to derive actual sales data, as the basis for assessment.
- For terminals where inventory checks are inconvenient, a delayed accounting method can be adopted, that is, when the terminal places a second or third order, the sales performance of the first batch is settled for the salesperson.
IV. Direct Users Previously, the definition of terminals was retail terminals, but retail terminals are not direct users. Direct using units and consumers are the true users. Therefore, the definition of terminals should be further sunk to the level of direct users and consumer households.
Ultimately, what distributors master locally is not hundreds or thousands of terminals, but tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of consumer users.
Born as a private business owner, he has operated a family distributor company for many years, during which he concurrently served as business manager and trainer in several production enterprises. His research direction is internal management of small and medium-sized private enterprises, with main topics including personnel management, cost control, management backend construction, and the entry of retired military personnel into private enterprises. He continuously breaks down over 400 topics related to internal management of private enterprises and maintains material collection and solution updates.
Click the image for details The 3rd (CFIC) China FMCG + Internet Conference will be held in Chongqing in October 2017. At this conference, New Distribution has invited 1000+ distributors, 500+ brand owners, 200+ B2B platform founders, and 100+ investment and financing institutions to participate.
The theme of this conference: New Forces, New Ecosystem. At that time, we will invite well-known domestic B2B industry experts, mentors, and B2B platform founders to discuss the following topics:
********How can the FMCG industry leverage B2B to achieve new growth opportunities
********How to build the new supply chain behind new retail
********How can intra-city logistics help B2B achieve leapfrog development Highlights of this conference: The industry's first "2017 China FMCG B2B Industry Competitiveness White Paper"
B2B and investor project closed-door matchmaking meeting
********Conference site + exhibition center, dual internet technology exhibition
********Alibaba, EAS, Best Store Plus, GLP, Unilever, Haiding, Yunmei Co., Ltd., and other most well-known business leaders from various fields will give speeches on-site and express pioneering views. October 17-18, 2017 Chongqing Exhibition Center Registration channel is now open. Long press the QR code below or click "Read Original" to register. Early bird tickets before September 15 enjoy a 30% discount! Add friend and note "Conference Registration" -END-