---
title: "First Build Momentum, Then Volume! If You Don't Do These Things in the Off-Season, Expecting High Volume in Peak Season Is Wishful Thinking!"
description: "Simply put, momentum must precede volume—there should be no doubt about it. The factors affecting peak-season volume are: number of outlets, number of core outlets, number of outlets willing to sell for you, and number of consumers willing to buy. In industry terms, these are distribution rate, core outlet count, outlet push rate, and consumer awareness. To build momentum, you must improve distribution rate, develop core outlets, cultivate consumers, and strengthen team execution."
author: "王阿宾"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2019-10-31"
categories: "Management & Methods"
language: "en"
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original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/RjsLJe0dqfZnvaRI45bdDw"
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attribution: "New Distribution — https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/first-build-momentum-then-volume-if-you-don-t-do-these-things-in-the-off-785223c6/"
citation: "王阿宾. “First Build Momentum, Then Volume! If You Don't Do These Things in the Off-Season, Expecting High Volume in Peak Season Is Wishful Thinking!.” New Distribution, 2019-10-31. https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/first-build-momentum-then-volume-if-you-don-t-do-these-things-in-the-off-785223c6/"
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---

# First Build Momentum, Then Volume! If You Don't Do These Things in the Off-Season, Expecting High Volume in Peak Season Is Wishful Thinking!

> Simply put, momentum must precede volume—there should be no doubt about it. The factors affecting peak-season volume are: number of outlets, number of core outlets, number of outlets willing to sell for you, and number of consumers willing to buy. In industry terms, these are distribution rate, core outlet count, outlet push rate, and consumer awareness. To build momentum, you must improve distribution rate, develop core outlets, cultivate consumers, and strengthen team execution.

Simply put, momentum must precede volume—there should be no doubt about it.
So what factors affect peak-season volume?
> **1. How many outlets. 2. How many core outlets. 3. How many outlets are willing to sell for you. 4. How many people are willing to buy.**
In industry terms, these are distribution rate, core outlet count, outlet push rate, and consumer awareness.
Therefore, **to build momentum, you must: improve distribution rate, develop core outlets, cultivate consumers, and strengthen team execution.**

**-01- Distribution: Achieve distribution rate, covering over 70% of main outlets for same-price competitors**

**1. How to improve distribution rate?**
Divide the existing team into groups and carry out concentrated distribution activities. Focus on three months, split into three stages, and run distribution competitions.
The first stage targets urban outlets; the second stage targets surrounding areas and urban-rural fringes; the third stage fills gaps and deepens development.
During this period, KPI assessment should emphasize distribution, increasing the coefficient for outlet development quantity in KPI. Also set up development awards, with cash rewards for stage champions. The overall champion gets a higher reward.
Track daily outlet development numbers and successful methods, summarize results, and learn from each other. For difficult cases, provide one-on-many guidance and on-site drills.

**2. Distribution precautions**
The distribution method should be small-batch, high-frequency distribution or replenishment. This ensures store owners don't take too much stock and aren't afraid to accept it. As long as they can sell a little, they'll feel it sells well, and sales staff should follow up promptly to replenish quickly.

**-02- Core outlet cultivation: Reach over 20% of stocking outlets**

**1. The role of core outlets:**
**Role 1: Drive high volume in peak season.** Core outlets have large throughput; once they believe your product sells, they'll stock up heavily when peak season arrives.
**Role 2: Drive ordinary outlets.** Core outlets often influence surrounding or well-connected outlets. They watch core outlets' product throughput, and core outlet sales often set an example, driving them to stock.
**Role 3: Set price benchmarks.** Core outlets are often the main force in maintaining prices. They focus on long-term stable returns, so they protect prices well, and their price protection influences consumer and ordinary outlet perceptions.
**Role 4: Boost market confidence.** Core outlets are usually opinion leaders in the market. Products sold in core outlets gain trust from both consumers and ordinary outlets.

**2. Conditions for selecting core outlets:**
Condition 1: High-volume retailers with significant sales share.
Condition 2: Influence over surrounding outlets and appeal among similar outlets, i.e., with some wholesale nature.
Condition 3: Strong recognition of the company's operating model and good willingness to cooperate.
Condition 4: Good reputation in the industry, without negative impact on the product.
Condition 5: The product fills a gap in their product structure or has clear advantages over bestsellers.

**3. Methods for cultivating core outlets:**
**Creating a hot-selling atmosphere: Continuous outlet merchandising, uninterrupted multi-form promotional support, constant small-batch replenishment, and continuous prize redemption.**
**Maintaining customer relationships: Plan visit routes and conduct periodic visits, ensuring core outlets are visited at least twice a week.**
Analyze and sort out outlet relationship maintenance points, formulate a monthly outlet relationship improvement plan, and strictly follow it. For example, check if the owner or family has birthdays this month, how many dinners are needed, what small gifts to prepare, which customers need assistance in development, whether there are travel arrangements, or any special hobbies of the owner.

**-03- Consumer awareness cultivation**
Consumer awareness cultivation mainly focuses on consumer changes.
1. Tell consumers who is using our products to satisfy their vanity.
2. Create outlet and city atmosphere to make consumers feel our product is about to become hot or is already hot.
3. Run consumer promotions to create a hot atmosphere, while using benefits and fun to induce purchases and maintain good sell-through momentum.
For group-buy promotions, aim for those who see it to buy, and buyers get benefits; for outlet promotions, those who enter the store see it, those who see it try it, and those who buy get discounts; for restaurant promotions, those who enter can taste it, those who taste it are willing to participate, and participants get purchase discounts.
4. Conduct tasting events to let consumers try and accept the product's quality and taste.
5. Conduct PR activities, especially interactive events with core consumers, to bring the brand closer to consumers and increase brand identification. Note that the principle is to use core groups to drive target consumer groups.

**-04- Team development**
Team development refers to the following three aspects:
**1. Standardization.**
Standardize outlet actions: standardize outlet visit routes and outlet visit actions.
Standardize outlet merchandising: standardize merchandising items, specifications, quantities, norms, and compliance requirements.
Standardize outlet relationships: standardize relationship goals, items, implementation plans, and result checks.
Standardize daily management: standardize daily management items, compliance standards, and reward/punishment measures.

**2. Improve sales personnel's individual combat capability.**
**Method 1: Training and drills.** These are two steps. Training instills professional ethics, skills, and habits in sales staff, and can be internal or external, with internal training recommended. Drills are more important; they are key to ensuring training doesn't become mere formality.
Be sure to conduct on-site drills during training. Assign roles to all personnel and conduct one-on-one or one-to-many drills based on training content and personal understanding, forming techniques and methods that suit them, so they can handle real situations with ease. Drills also boost sales staff confidence and prepare them for various challenges.
**Method 2: Mentoring—old hands lead new hands one-on-one.** I won't elaborate much, but here's a tip: pair capable and pragmatic old hands with promising new hands, capable but slow old hands with diligent new hands, and pragmatic but average old hands with average new hands. You can figure out the reasoning yourself.
**Method 3: Establish good daily norms.** I won't elaborate here. Good habits and a good atmosphere lead to good performance.

**3. Maintain sales staff confidence and morale.**
**Method 1: Healthy personnel rotation.** Establish an internal elimination mechanism, eliminating bottom performers in each stage and continuously bringing in new people. This maintains team vitality, and old hands have inexplicable confidence and motivation in front of new people.
**Method 2: Internal competitions.** Around stage work priorities, hold large-scale internal competitions. The scale should be large, but goals should be broken down as small as possible. For example, for a monthly outlet development activity, break goals down to weekly or even daily development numbers. This creates a big buzz to mobilize the atmosphere, while small, specific goals are easier to achieve, continuously boosting sales staff confidence.
**Method 3: Create heroes.** In each stage, highlight top performers through bonuses, prizes, certificates, honor boards, commendation meetings, and sharing reports. Note that heroes aren't just sales champions; they also include outlet development champions, merchandising champions, and relationship champions.
**Method 4: Refine and strengthen KPI assessment.** This is important. Many companies focus on results and ignore the process, thinking that as long as sales staff complete tasks, they don't care how they did it. This is a big mistake. It leads to slackness, low morale, lack of communication and mutual promotion among teams, and unfairness—sales staff in good regions get good sales whether they work hard or not. So you need to define core work for each stage, further break down that core work, and include it in assessments.

**Conclusion:**
Overall, building momentum before peak season is the core.
**What is momentum? It's channel confidence, store owner confidence, sales staff confidence, and consumer confidence. Through the above activities and methods, you can gather this confidence, and then it's hard not to achieve volume in peak season.**


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## Citation metadata

- Publisher: New Distribution
- Author: 王阿宾
- Published: 2019-10-31
- Canonical: https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/first-build-momentum-then-volume-if-you-don-t-do-these-things-in-the-off-785223c6/
- Original source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/RjsLJe0dqfZnvaRI45bdDw

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