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During the year-end peak season, as a sales manager, how can you increase sales of medium-to-high margin products? In today's homogenized marketing environment, how can you create a hot-selling scenario for your products? While doing the basics of product promotion, are there better methods to make your product stand out and become a leader among similar products? The following five methods or techniques can help achieve these goals.
Bluffing Method
"Mr. Zhang, the Spring Festival is approaching. Our company has just launched a new product with a sweet and refreshing taste, exquisite packaging, and substantial profit margins. Trucks are already lining up to pick up goods. You should come and take a look now; if you wait a few more days, you might not even see a sample," said a sales manager from a liquor company during a phone call to a customer in a market, promoting a new high-margin product for the Spring Festival. In reality, the sales manager knew that if the customer came to see the product, the created hot-selling atmosphere would be enough to win them over.
This method of promoting new products is a classic example of the bluffing method. By creating a sense of urgency and excitement, it leverages people's herd mentality. During the peak season, vividly describing the promising profit prospects of the new product can "lure" customers in, successfully promoting medium-to-high margin products. Key points for using the bluffing method:
Creating momentum is crucial. The success of this method depends on effectively creating a hot-selling atmosphere. Seeing is believing. By organizing order meetings, social gatherings, etc., and inviting customers to the factory, they can experience the popularity firsthand, which often moves and convinces them. This encourages customers to firmly adopt these medium-to-high margin products.
Use empathy. Profit-seeking is a customer's nature. When persuading them to promote medium-to-high margin products, if you can put yourself in their shoes and provide an analysis of the maximum benefits they can gain from selling these new products, it can sometimes more easily enter their minds and touch their hearts, naturally achieving the goal of winning them over.
Add a touch of mystery. While bluffing, incorporating some mysterious elements can enhance the effect. For example, a sales manager, while showing a customer the high-margin new products at the factory, might say in a mysterious tone: "These products are reserved for a boss in the XX market. The supply is very tight. Boss Li next door asked for 1,000 cases but only got 100 after ten days of requests." This creates an atmosphere of scarcity, attracting customer attention and interest.
Of course, when using this method, it's important to strike a balance; overdoing it can backfire. Additionally, if you can create a model market or set up a market benchmark beforehand, the persuasion effect will be even better.
Indirect Persuasion Method
"Mr. Li, the new product 'Good Brothers' you ordered is currently out of stock. Although this product is priced higher, you know that due to strong and novel promotions, it has been in short supply since production began. Your shipment won't arrive until five days later. I suggest you place orders at least three days in advance in the future; otherwise, no one can guarantee timely supply," said a sales manager from a large instant noodle company, deliberately answering another customer's "urgent" call in front of the target customer to create a buzz. This tactic indeed piqued the target customer's curiosity and appetite, and under the manager's guidance, they quickly placed an order for this new product with higher margins.
This describes the "indirect persuasion" method. By answering calls in front of one customer or discussing product popularity with another customer, you can "beat the grass to scare the snake" and achieve the goal of making the customer comply. Key points for the indirect persuasion method:
Deliberately create suspense. Creating suspense and leaving questions unanswered is common when promoting medium-to-high margin products in the FMCG industry. The approach is to give the other party room for imagination without rushing to reveal details, stimulating curiosity and ultimately achieving the goal of "subduing the enemy without fighting."
Use provocation. This method involves deliberately favoring one party to "provoke" the other, leading them to fall into your trap. For example, a sales manager might allow some customers in the region to sell medium-to-high margin new products while "declaring" that others cannot, making those without "qualification" angry. Then, the manager can use strategies like compromise, mediation, or giving face to "let go to catch," exploiting customers' desire for face to promote more new products.
Leverage others' influence. Use the power of others to influence and drive some stubborn customers to sell medium-to-high margin products. For instance, provide real-life examples from customers' peers to illustrate the feasibility, growth potential, and high profits of selling these products, making customers genuinely convinced and willing to accept the new products.
Additionally, methods like taking photos of hot-selling scenes can infect and motivate customers, serving as indirect persuasion and "throwing a brick to attract jade," influencing the "stubborn" ones. These auxiliary measures help achieve the goal of maximizing sales of medium-to-high margin products.
Promotion-Driven Pull Method
Promotion is the most effective and important means for manufacturers to promote medium-to-high margin products. Through clever and sequential promotional setups, these seemingly hard-to-sell products can truly "move." When using the promotion-driven pull method, note the following:
Study distributor psychology. To smoothly get medium-to-high margin products to distributors, you must use promotion as a powerful "weapon." Based on distributors' profit-seeking psychology, cleverly set up promotions to achieve your goals. For example, a liquor manufacturer, when promoting high-margin products, included a scratch card in each case with attractive prizes like bicycles, washing machines, TVs, and computers. However, it also stipulated that once the card was scratched, the product could not be returned. This effectively controlled distributors who sought extra gains.
Master all links. To ensure the product reaches the end consumer, it's important to provide layered incentives and pull through distributors, sub-distributors, terminal retailers, and consumers, activating the entire channel value chain. For instance, Henan Yangshao Distillery, before the Spring Festival, promoted medium-to-high-end products by setting up sequential prizes, not only smoothing the sales channel but also setting up an in-box activity to "find the little golden Buddha," greatly stimulating the enthusiasm and initiative of channel partners, restaurants, and consumers, achieving excellent market performance.
Control promotion intensity. To maintain medium-to-high margin products as truly profitable items, manufacturers must control promotion intensity, adjusting it according to the product life cycle stages (introduction, growth, maturity, decline) to avoid high margins but low or no profits. The positioning of medium-to-high margin products should not change due to promotion investment levels.
Using promotions to drive sales of medium-to-high margin products is a common practice among many companies. However, only by deeply studying customer psychology, flexibly setting promotion formats, and freely controlling promotion intensity can companies maintain the original intent of launching these products and achieve their promotion goals.
Opinion Leader Influence Method
Medium-to-high margin products are often medium-to-high-end products. Therefore, when entering the market, it's necessary to segment the market, identify opinion leaders among target consumers, integrate relevant resources, and adopt a focused strategy to drive consumption across the market. In the opinion leader influence method, you can use the 6Os analysis to formulate supporting launch measures for medium-to-high margin products:
Occupants (purchasers): Study who buys these medium-to-high margin products. Are the purchasers the consumers? What is their purchasing psychology? What needs do they have? Identifying the purchasers clarifies the main line of promotion.
Objects (purchase targets): What aspects of these products do purchasers value? Is it the high cost-performance ratio, the product's grade or taste, or other emotional needs? For example, buying "Brain Gold" is essentially buying its "gift" positioning. Clarifying the purchase target helps uncover the product's appeal points, attracting and moving purchasers through unique selling propositions (USP).
Objectives (purchase purposes): What are the motives for buying these products? Is it for personal consumption, as gifts, or other purposes? Understanding the purchase purpose helps select matching sales channels.
Occasions (purchase times): When do purchases of these products concentrate? Are there core sales days? How frequent are purchases? Knowing the purchase timing helps determine the best launch or promotion timing.
Outlets (purchase locations): Through which channels or places do customers buy the products? Do they consider convenience? Which channels do they trust? Channels must match the product, and attention should be paid to developing special channels like group buying and online shopping.
Operations (purchase behaviors): Are purchases impulsive or rational? What proportion is each? What factors or indicators do purchasers mainly consider? In-depth research into purchase behavior helps formulate product promotion and sales strategies.
By clarifying these six points, manufacturers and sales managers can adopt targeted "attack" strategies tailored to local conditions, using powerful marketing tactics to continuously capture target buyers or consumers.
Case Study: A liquor factory in Jiangsu expanded into the Zhengzhou market by taking a high-end route. Due to the high price of the liquor, following conventional market operations like retail and restaurant distribution might have led to products sitting on shelves due to low brand awareness. After overall consideration, the company organized gatherings and tea parties for successful individuals in politics, business, finance, and media from the same hometown, offering free tastings. Based on potential consumption analysis, they classified these people into ABC categories and provided regular free liquor, home visits, phone calls, and gold, silver, and copper consumption cards. This made these opinion leaders often carry the company's products in their car trunks. Through their consumption at dinners and banquets, coupled with the product's good quality and word-of-mouth, the liquor quickly became popular among high-end consumers in Zhengzhou.
In today's rising consumption levels and capacity, fully utilizing opinion leaders to guide consumption can sometimes yield unexpected results. Although medium-to-high margin products might be marginalized in promotion, these opinion leaders are the main consumer group. Therefore, capturing these consumption leaders means capturing the market.
Bundling Sales Method
The bundling sales method is commonly used and quite effective for selling medium-to-high margin products. However, its premise is that the company has at least one or more products that are popular or trendy in the market, using these bestsellers to drive sales of medium-to-high margin products, achieving a "winding path to seclusion" effect.
Key points for using the bundling sales method to promote medium-to-high margin products:
Must have bestsellers as a foundation. Bestsellers are often products that distributors must sell, even products they rely on for survival. When bestsellers are irreplaceable in the short term, implementing bundling sales is a convenient way to quickly push medium-to-high margin products to the market. The essence is "love me, love my dog."
Be good at "borrowing channels to water." When promoting medium-to-high margin products, share channel resources and fully utilize all available channels. Although circulation channels are not the best for medium-to-high-end products, they can lead the market with differentiated forms that set them apart from competitors.
Have supporting promotion measures. When bundling, avoid making distributors feel burdened. Through reasonable product, price, channel, and promotion settings, let distributors promote medium-to-high margin products with pleasure, not as a pressure, so they can better appreciate the sales potential.
A year's plan lies in the peak season. For FMCG manufacturers to effectively promote medium-to-high margin products during the year-end peak season, they must be market-demand-oriented, based on differentiation, and continuously innovate marketing ideas and methods. Only then can the promotion of medium-to-high margin products be smoother and more targeted, allowing companies and products to navigate the fiercely competitive market, quickly find their own blue ocean, and maximize their share of the market pie.
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