Almost every food distributor starts with mobile sales in the early days of their business. In a sense, mobile sales is the simplest and most practical sales model, where salespeople visit customers with a vehicle stocked with goods, sell and collect payment on the spot, and handle tasks such as posting promotional materials, product display, and customer complaints, making management relatively easy for distributors. However, with rising costs of labor, fuel, and vehicle wear, as well as increasingly fierce competition among homogeneous products, higher demands are placed on distributors' terminal operations. Many distributors complain that mobile sales costs are too high and efficiency is low, leading to thin profits or even losses, but the root cause is often overly loose management in the mobile sales process, or that the current business situation is no longer suitable for the mobile sales model. So, how should distributors adjust and improve their sales model to maximize profitability?
Profit or Loss? First Calculate the Cost
Is mobile sales profitable? Distributors must first learn to calculate costs. Suppose the average gross margin of the products a distributor handles is 15 points. With a monthly sales volume of 100,000 yuan, the gross profit would be 15,000 yuan, but this is without accounting for expenses and costs, so it can be called "pre-sale gross profit." Now, the basic configuration for mobile sales is one vehicle with two people (a salesperson and a driver), plus the costs of warehouse and back-office personnel and other overheads, such as monthly taxes and entertainment expenses, all of which fall under "fixed costs." Subtracting "fixed costs" from "pre-sale gross profit" gives the distributor's final profit.
Calculating pre-sale gross profit is not complicated; the key is calculating fixed costs. For just the "one vehicle, two people" of mobile sales, the combined wages and commissions for the driver and salesperson are no less than 150 yuan per day, and fuel and vehicle wear are about 150 yuan per day, meaning each vehicle costs at least 300 yuan per day. From this, we can roughly estimate the break-even point: with a 15% gross margin, a vehicle needs daily sales of 2,000 yuan to break even, 3,000 yuan to achieve a small profit, and 5,000 yuan to create good returns.
So, mobile sales is not necessarily unprofitable; the key is sales volume. Distributors need to calculate the break-even point per vehicle based on product sales and gross margin, and use this as the minimum sales target for sales staff. If salespeople cannot even complete the minimum task, it means not only no profit but also losses, and distributors need to analyze the reasons from the sales perspective and find ways to increase sales.
The "Troubles" Behind Mobile Sales
Currently, mobile sales remains the primary sales model for most distribution food distributors, but this does not mean it is suitable for all stages or all products. In fact, distributors often encounter various "troubles" during mobile sales, which significantly increase costs.
The limitations of mobile sales mainly include two points: one is time – goods must be sold the same day, loading and unloading take time, and unsold goods must be brought back; the other is space – terminal customers are at varying distances, and "wasted trips" cause transport inefficiency. This limitation is especially obvious for distributors with many product items, as they don't know what customers have or lack, leading to inaccurate loading forecasts for each item, and even for a few scattered small customers, they must make another trip the next day. Additionally, factors such as weather, road conditions, prices, salespeople's negotiation skills, and customer size make it difficult to accurately predict daily sales. If the load is too small, returning mid-route for replenishment is impractical; if too large, there is a risk of returns, causing waste of manpower and materials.
Of course, the advantages of mobile sales are also obvious. First, it helps increase the closing rate. Customers can see the physical product, and goods can be unloaded, payment collected, and transactions completed on the spot, which also helps distributors with cash flow. Especially during peak seasons, transactions at C and D class terminal outlets are highly random, and salespeople's negotiation skills can be leveraged to urge on-the-spot deals, adding to overall sales. Second, it facilitates terminal customer management. Ordering, delivery, visual merchandising, and customer complaint handling are all handled by the designated route salesperson, and customers know exactly who they deal with, so problems (such as returns or exchanges) can often be resolved on the spot, greatly reducing the possibility of employee disputes and buck-passing.
Overall, the mobile sales model is more suitable for products with fast turnover or high individual delivery costs, as this allows the advantages of mobile sales to be fully utilized, achieving a reasonable input-output efficiency. Additionally, during product introduction or market development stages, even if losses are expected, mobile sales should still be used to ensure high distribution rates. However, in the long run, the cost pressure of mobile sales will become a burden for distributors.
When the Scale Grows, Consider Introducing a Pre-order Model
Using the mobile sales model during the initial promotion of a product is necessary, but for mature products with stable sales, the significance of mobile sales diminishes. Therefore, distributors need to flexibly adjust and change their sales model based on the product's market stage, and introducing a pre-order mechanism at the right time may be a better choice.
Pre-order, simply put, is a sales model where orders are taken first and delivery is made later. Salespeople visit terminal customers on a fixed route periodically, collect orders, and then the delivery department handles delivery. Compared to mobile sales, pre-order emphasizes division of labor and efficiency: salespeople work alone, focusing on order taking, visual merchandising, and complaint handling, while the delivery department can arrange loading quantities for different items based on orders, improving vehicle utilization and making delivery faster than mobile sales. However, introducing a pre-order model has prerequisites, the most important being a certain sales scale.
For example, when launching a new beverage product, if monthly sales reach 3,000 cases with a gross profit of 5 yuan per case, the total profit is 15,000 yuan, basically overcoming the initial loss period. At this point, mobile sales is still necessary because with 600 effective terminals, the average monthly sales per store is only 5 cases, so 24-hour delivery must be ensured to avoid stockouts. Later, as the product gains momentum, sales may grow exponentially, possibly exceeding 10,000 cases in a short time. At that point, daily sales can reach over 300 cases, and with this sales base, delivery timeliness becomes less critical. Distributors can then try to push some inventory to terminals, ensuring stores have enough stock for a week, while integrating delivery routes and gradually transitioning from mobile sales to a pre-order model. For example, within a 40-kilometer radius with 6 townships, one salesperson takes orders, visiting two townships a day, and after three days, a large truck delivers all orders at once. This not only improves efficiency but also greatly reduces costs, ensuring distributor profits.
After Pre-order, Pursue Maximum Efficiency
The pre-order model not only has certain restrictions on sales scale but also imposes higher management requirements. First, increase investment in personnel and vehicles. With traditional mobile sales, a distributor only needs to assign one salesperson and one driver per vehicle, and sometimes can save labor costs by having the salesperson double as the driver. The pre-order model requires separation of sales and delivery departments, with salespeople needing their own vehicles to visit terminals, and delivery requiring both a driver and a delivery worker, which is one of the main reasons some distributors are reluctant to adopt the pre-order model.
But distributors must understand: high investment also means high output. From the perspective of per-vehicle efficiency, mobile sales typically uses small or medium trucks with a load capacity of about 200 cases. With a profit of 5 yuan per case, the daily benefit is 1,000 yuan. Pre-order can use large box trucks with a load capacity of at least 1,000 cases, yielding a daily benefit of 5,000 yuan. From a cost perspective, in the pre-order model, the driver and delivery worker each earn 100 yuan per day, plus vehicle wear and fuel, totaling no more than 400 yuan, which is not much higher than mobile sales costs, but the output is five times greater.
Additionally, distributors can optimize the ratio of vehicles to personnel. For example, a distributor with annual sales exceeding 10 million yuan might have 3 vehicles, 3 drivers, and 3 delivery workers in the delivery department. Even during peak season, such a "high configuration" is unnecessary. With proper planning and management, only 2 vehicles, 2 drivers, and 1 delivery worker are needed: one vehicle delivers daily, the other serves as a backup, activated when volume increases, and salespeople can act as flexible personnel, temporarily serving as drivers or delivery workers without affecting normal delivery. Also, during the off-season, distributors should avoid idle personnel and can organize warehouse sorting and inventory checks to make the best use of everyone.
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