The concept of 'all-staff marketing' has been around for some years, but from today's perspective, it is clearly underdeveloped. However, this is not a major issue, just as no one can clearly explain what 'new retail' is today, yet it does not hinder the continued vigorous advancement of new retail.
All-staff marketing, as the name suggests, most directly means that every person in the company is a sales touchpoint.
This is the first layer of meaning. On a deeper level, all-staff marketing leans more toward the meaning of marketing integration, where every position within the organization centers on marketing for resource allocation and support. To achieve the second layer, it inevitably involves adjustments to organizational structure and functions. For distributors who are accustomed to focusing on the big picture and starting with small steps, it is also a pragmatic choice to first do the first layer well in stages.
In upstream brand companies, the operation of all-staff marketing is more concentrated on internal personnel. However, for most distributors, the organizational team is not too large. If all-staff marketing only focuses on their own internal staff, they are likely to make the dogmatic mistake of picking up sesame seeds and losing watermelons.
Therefore, all-staff marketing must be a top-down, full-chain marketing, involving changes in three major relationships: between distributors and brand owners, between distributors and employees, and between distributors and consumers. This is also the concept of everyone-retail, which poses three major challenges to the future positioning of distributors.
Relationship with the Enterprise
From a pure manufacturer-distributor relationship to switching between employee and distributor identities
Against the backdrop of increasingly flattened channels, the rise of internet platforms, and the weakening of brand owners, the profits of both brand owners and traditional channel distributors are being significantly eroded. The brand premium of small and medium-sized enterprises is increasingly unable to sustain the costs of sales teams. In previous years, it was not uncommon for brand owners to support employees in starting their own businesses and becoming distributors. However, in recent years, the reverse operation of turning enterprise distributors into regional sales personnel has become more frequent.
Distributor Liu from Shanxi benefited precisely from such a backdrop. His distribution business grew tenfold in just four years. Of course, this time we met Liu again after four years.
Back then, he was a salesperson for the company he now distributes for, covering parts of Shanxi and Inner Mongolia. Just over 30 years old, he carried a black briefcase that had long been ubiquitous, traveling between the two provinces 365 days a year. Every six months, he returned to headquarters for a report, and every month, the order-taking girl, like the Heibai Wuchang (two deities in Chinese mythology), urged him for orders. Although life was not easy, he still had time for leisure.
In 2014, thanks to our suggestion of a 'light operation' marketing system for this small enterprise, the company began a sales reform of 'all-staff marketing'. In this reform, Liu's identity as a salesperson transformed into the general distributor for the Taiyuan region for this Shenzhen-based company. From then on, Xiao Liu became Liu Zong (General Manager Liu), and his relationship with the manufacturer became simpler: from then on, it was just money for goods, with full responsibility for profits and losses.
In four years, Taiyuan's sales easily crossed the 5 million mark from several hundred thousand, while the entire Shanxi province's sales were still less than 8 million. Today, Liu Zong still has a smiling, Maitreya-like demeanor, but his graying temples inadvertently reveal the hardships and worldliness of a businessman.
At this moment, he continues to express his gratitude to us. The 'light operation' all-staff marketing policy was further adjusted last year. As a distributor, his identity has now changed somewhat. From salesperson to distributor, from simple transactions to deep cooperation, he is now not only the general agent for Taiyuan but also the manufacturer's representative for the entire Shanxi province. However, as this manufacturer's representative, he has no fixed salary; instead, he receives 5 points from the overall sales of Shanxi province as marketing expenses.
Liu Zong seems to have returned to the starting point, but clearly at a higher starting point than before.
This kind of change for Liu Zong will happen to many distributors in the future, especially those of small and medium-sized enterprises, who will feel this change more quickly. The trend of channel reform is inevitable, and distributor channels are struggling to find a way out in a posture of being shattered and then reshaped. The comprehensive merger of the salesperson line and the distributor line—where distributors are salespeople and salespeople are distributors—to achieve corporate burden reduction and employee wealth creation is one such difficult attempt.
Relationship with Employees
From a pure employment relationship to switching between employee and shareholder identities
It is a common consensus among distributors that it is difficult to recruit people, and even harder to recruit capable people. Since the start of 'mass entrepreneurship and innovation', a catchphrase has circulated in the marketing circle: 'Without shares, people cannot become rich; without night grass, horses cannot become fat.' Keeping people, keeping capable people, and once they stay, making them work hard with all their might—this is a problem distributors think about day and night. Whether to give shares is not the issue; how to give them is the key.
Sitting in front of Zhao Zong, you would never guess that he is a large distributor with a scale exceeding 300 million.
In 2013, when the internet was fully rising, Zhao Zong in Foshan began researching equity reform and organizational upgrading. In that era of national entrepreneurship, the younger brothers who had followed him for many years began to become restless. Old Zhao knew the principle of 'when people gather, wealth disperses; when wealth gathers, people disperse'. Unfortunately, time was short, and he was forced to act hastily. At the end of that year, Zhao Zong could only implement the equity reform policy in a planned but unstepwise manner.
First, a pilot equity reform was conducted in directly operated stores, where Old Zhao only held 51%, with the remaining shares distributed among key positions and key employees. Equity reform is a good thing; it immediately unleashed the enthusiasm of these younger brothers. In 2014, despite a very tight overall environment, the sales of several directly operated stores nearly doubled. In the past few years, the matter of building hidden channels, which had been talked about every day, saw rapid progress that year. However, as more and more younger brothers met the conditions for equity reform, new problems emerged: too many shares distributed would lead to loss of control, while too few would demotivate employees.
To expand into new markets, Old Zhao later adopted a 'non-controlling entrepreneurship plan'. He selected employees he favored, based on their hometowns, to take on some new markets, encouraging them to register new companies and return to their hometowns to start businesses. For peripheral markets, Zhao Zong did not hold controlling stakes but only participated in shares, replicating his entire business philosophy to the new markets. These employees who returned to their hometowns to start businesses were all loyal followers of Old Zhao for over ten years, deeply influenced by him. They received help from Zhao Zong in terms of capital, goods, and experience, and were all grateful for his support.
Today, Old Zhao holds 51% controlling stakes in directly operated markets, while other markets are only participated in shares. The vast majority of employees have become shareholders of the company. And every employee who has become a shareholder is also striving to sell every piece of goods for the company.
Making employees shareholders and shareholders employees, when rights and responsibilities fully overlap, the engine of all-staff marketing truly starts. The future belongs to decentralized organizations, where large platforms give rise to small platforms, creating more infinite possibilities for both employees and enterprises.
Relationship with Consumers
From a pure buying-selling relationship to switching between consumer and seller identities
The ultimate form of new retail is roughly to achieve the situation of everyone-retail, smart retail, and unmanned retail. Among them, everyone-retail is about lowering the threshold of retail through technological means, making retail forms more generalized.
In past marketing innovations, the referral of old customers has always been a focus. In today's information-explosive internet era, the precise referrals of old customers are even more valuable. In 2016, the three-level distribution system using QR codes as a medium was overused by WeChat business and became ubiquitous, thus being labeled as a pyramid scheme. However, the effort to make consumers become sellers has never stopped among distributors.
Wang Zong in Dongguan is the Dongguan agent for a certain study desk and chair brand. For the purchase of such children's learning products, from the earliest prenatal education and early education supplies to later maternal and infant products and electronic educational products, their target audiences are highly overlapping. Moreover, such groups easily form small circles, where the probability of mutual influence in purchasing among mothers and fathers is very high. Based on this understanding, Wang Zong has been sparing no effort to find the G-spot of turning consumers into sellers, to open the valve of automatic sales.
In 2018, Wang Zong launched an activity called 'Seeking Promotional Ambassadors for the Citywide Youth Health Public Welfare Activity'. Consumers who purchased the public welfare model (which is the company's special price model, the lowest price for the entire set) of study desks and chairs within a specified time, and voluntarily signed a contract to participate in the 'XX Brand Youth Health Public Welfare Activity Promotion', were awarded a certificate as 'Public Welfare Promotion Ambassador'. From the date of purchase, if they introduced three consumers to purchase the designated public welfare promotion model within one year, by the end of the year, they could return the equivalent amount of their own purchase of study desks and chairs with receipts. Even if they did not meet the target of three purchases by the end of the year, they could still receive a refund of 30% of the purchase amount for each introduction.
For such activities, some consumers even directly called over friends from the mother circle on the spot, turning the scene into a buy-three-get-one-free group purchase, which also increased the single purchase amount.
For consumers, all-staff marketing is closer to the offline version of everyone-retail. Internet technology only provides us with the possibility to reach more consumers, but to truly make consumers accept you, a living, flesh-and-blood three-dimensional intermediary is far more impactful than a piece of information or a link.
In the era of online-offline integration, it is the distributors who are most urgently in need of change to adapt to the environment. In the history of biological evolution, the ones that ultimately survive are not the strongest, fastest, or largest, but those that adapt and change the fastest.
Those who are good at change survive. Just as in the industrial era, the voices that traditional handicrafts would completely disappear were loud, today we are magically experiencing the arrival of the era of traditional handicraftsmen. Perhaps in another ten years, the voices that want to overthrow all distributors will also eventually die down and sigh in despair.
Tips will be paid 400-2000 yuan once adopted.
China FMCG + Internet Professional New Media
Committed to FMCG manufacturer and distributor transformation and channel digital solutions