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Year-end is a critical period for distributors to build on the past and prepare for the future. Food distributors must not only follow manufacturers' rhythms for product ordering, stocking, and Spring Festival promotion scheduling but also summarize and review their annual business performance, set new plans and goals for the coming year, and lay a solid foundation for a better start. So, what should distributors be busy with?
Review Goal Achievement. Achieving sales targets is the most basic requirement for distributors to survive and grow. At minimum, we should check the actual completion of the following goals:
1. Sales Targets. Have the annual sales targets set at the beginning of the year been met? Have the sales targets assigned by the manufacturers you distribute or represent been achieved? What is the completion rate? Specifically, for each manufacturer's annual sales volume and revenue, are they up or down compared to the previous year? Additionally, we should analyze the proportion of each manufacturer in your overall sales, and check whether new product promotion targets for the past year were met.
2. Profit Targets. Some distributors often focus on sales volume; when sales are high, they are happy as if they have earned a lot. Sales and profit are indeed related, but as a distributor boss, you must clearly understand the gross margin each manufacturer's product brings and the total annual gross profit. Do not be vague, because if you cannot clearly know how much you earned in a year, you won't know how to build your team, expand the market, or decide on market investment and its amount for the coming year. Therefore, checking whether annual profit targets were met and by how much is crucial for the second year's market operations. Do not keep a muddled account.
Analyze Reasons for Goal Achievement. Many distributors repeatedly repeat "past stories" on some operational issues, ultimately because they fail to identify the key reasons or core problems affecting performance, leading to repeated mistakes. Analyzing goal achievement can start from the following aspects:
1. Macro and Micro Economy and Market Environment. These are external factors but affect goal achievement. For example, new national laws and regulations, food safety incidents, and increasingly fierce market competition. Have you found ways to avoid or break through these impacts to better align with the overall trend, especially market demand?
2. Analyze from the 4P Perspective. Are the products you distribute suitable and marketable? Are categories and specifications complete? Is product renewal timely? Is market performance competitive? From the price level, do you have the authority for secondary pricing and operations? How does the manufacturer control price order? How effective are your price policies and their implementation? In terms of channels, have you adopted flat, diversified, and composite channel models? What are the sales and profit contributions of each channel? Which channels are losing growth momentum, and which need to be redeveloped? In promotion, do you insist on differentiation? Are promotion forms attractive to downstream channels and customers? Is the timing of promotions appropriate?
3. Market Support and Investment Status. To do well in a market, it must be the result of joint efforts by manufacturers and distributors. Besides checking the manufacturer's market investment, support, and effectiveness, you should also review from your own perspective whether you proactively invested in market operations based on market research and understanding, in what areas you invested, how it impacted market pull and sales growth, what forms the investment took, and how well the manufacturer cooperated with you.
4. Team Performance. Team composition, including source, education, job experience, skills, and techniques, affects sales. How is the team's combat effectiveness, execution, and collaboration? Also, focus on checking individual salesperson productivity and the productivity of the markets they manage. Only by improving individual and market productivity can a distributor company enter a virtuous cycle and create greater benefits.
Formulate Next Year's Marketing Plan. Summarizing and reviewing is to correct past mistakes and promote excellent experiences, but next year's marketing plan is what turns the summary into action and continuous improvement, ultimately better achieving next year's marketing goals. The annual marketing plan should include the following:
1. Formulation and Breakdown of Marketing Goals. Combine the sales targets assigned by manufacturers and your own development plans for the new year to set your company's sales goals, including sales revenue, profit targets, product structure targets, new product promotion targets, etc. This goal can be 20-30% higher than the manufacturer's assigned targets, which will help your company better complete the sales tasks of various manufacturers, especially key partners. Goals must be set scientifically and reasonably based on market, past years, product performance, and market investment. Goals that are "fake, big, and empty" made by "patting your head" based on feelings are not advisable. After setting goals, they must be quantified and broken down into monthly, per salesperson, per distributor and their staff, and per market. The finer the breakdown, the more conducive to achieving the goals.
2. Marketing 4P Strategy. For example, in terms of product, what new products to represent, which new categories from manufacturers to introduce, and which unprofitable manufacturers or products to compress or eliminate. In terms of price, based on the manufacturer's product positioning, what price levels to set or implement? Products should have their own price bands or tiers to avoid self-competition. Channel strategy: which new channels to develop, which model customers or markets to establish, how to implement standardized and refined operations, and to what level to go down. For instance, some distributors, when formulating new year marketing plans, explicitly decide to go down to rural areas and redesign and optimize their channel systems accordingly. Promotion strategy: arrange different content and forms of promotional activities based on holidays throughout the year, including promotion budgets and execution times. Some distributors also separate advertising from promotion, adding applicable products, time, place, advertising forms, and budget. Others focus on after-sales service, adding service strategies, and clarifying service processes, standards, implementation, and assessment.
3. Team Building. This is also very important. Around the new year's marketing goals, set up or optimize organizational structure and staffing, recruitment and training plans: recruitment time, onboarding time, responsible department, assisting department. For training plans, include: training schedule, content, instructor selection, training format, and budgets for all the above.
4. System Construction. Based on the new year's marketing plan and market needs, revise or formulate rules and regulations in a timely manner. For example, some distributors are troubled by downstream channel credit sales that are hard to collect, affecting capital turnover, so they formulate "Distributor Credit Evaluation and Credit Standards." Some distributors, based on market cross-selling and price chaos, formulate "Management Regulations on Strict Market Order." Besides these behavioral systems, include compensation and assessment systems. Flexibly adopt suitable compensation systems based on your development stage, whether commission-based or performance-based, all determined by actual circumstances.
Finally, distributors must not forget to seize the biggest peak season for food sales at year-end. Spring Festival best reflects Chinese people's expression of nostalgia and family affection. Therefore, actively stock up, especially gift-pack products, strengthen distribution to increase distribution and coverage rates, design promotions well, develop key accounts and group purchase channels, and score the "final shot" of Spring Festival sales to bring a good start to the new year.