---
title: "Getting Paid by You, Selling Others' Goods? Is the B2B Shared Business Model Reliable?"
description: "The FMCG industry is fundamentally labor-intensive and capital-intensive, and the heavy reliance on capital and labor was justified in the past when labor costs were low and supply-demand imbalances existed. However, with increased productivity, the seller's market has shifted to a buyer's market, and labor costs have risen. As a result, leading brands are cutting staff through various means to reduce costs, but market operations must continue. The emergence and development of shared business models in recent years have prompted us to consider the limitations of sharing traditional FMCG salespeople."
author: "新经销刘少德"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2018-09-18"
language: "en"
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original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/DQH9upEsp-XRI31FBYAOJw"
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# Getting Paid by You, Selling Others' Goods? Is the B2B Shared Business Model Reliable?

> The FMCG industry is fundamentally labor-intensive and capital-intensive, and the heavy reliance on capital and labor was justified in the past when labor costs were low and supply-demand imbalances existed. However, with increased productivity, the seller's market has shifted to a buyer's market, and labor costs have risen. As a result, leading brands are cutting staff through various means to reduce costs, but market operations must continue. The emergence and development of shared business models in recent years have prompted us to consider the limitations of sharing traditional FMCG salespeople.

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The FMCG industry is fundamentally labor-intensive and capital-intensive, and the heavy reliance on capital and labor was justified in the past when labor costs were low and supply-demand imbalances existed. However, with increased productivity, the seller's market has gradually shifted to a buyer's market, and labor costs have risen accordingly.
So we see leading brands downsizing their workforce through various means to cut costs. Although the number of market sales personnel has been significantly reduced, market operations must still be carried out. In recent years, the emergence and development of various shared business models have led us to consider: if traditional FMCG salespeople were shared, what limitations would arise?
**What are the prerequisites for sharing salespeople?**
**Before discussing this topic, let's look at a case the author encountered a few days ago:**
A county-level distributor representing three brands had nearly 10 salespeople (some were manufacturer reps requiring dedicated personnel and vehicles) and annual sales of 20 million yuan.
Salespeople arrived at the distributor's warehouse at 8 a.m., had a brief morning meeting, then spent an hour loading and unloading goods. From 9 to 10 a.m., they conducted terminal visits in the market. Besides terminal display maintenance and expense verification, they also had to handle product loading and unloading. They returned to the warehouse around 8 p.m., checked orders and accounts, and inventoried products in the vehicle, usually finishing around 9 p.m. Under these conditions, each salesperson visited only 15-20 stores per day, earning about 4,000 yuan per month.
Later, the distributor adjusted its operations: it outsourced non-core functions like warehousing and distribution to a third-party unified warehousing and distribution company, leaving salespeople to focus solely on terminal service and display. Since the assigned area was fixed, the time spent per store increased, and salespeople began to handle several other brands of the distributor. Subsequently, the distributor added more brands, and annual sales directly reached over 50 million yuan, with salespeople's monthly salaries generally exceeding 10,000 yuan.
Not being dedicated to a single brand but serving multiple brands is itself a form of shared business. From the above case, it's clear that as the distributor added brands, salespeople were effectively shared among several brands. The prerequisites for sharing salespeople are as follows:
> **1. Shift from vehicle sales to order-based visits:** Salespeople can visit as many stores as possible in the same time; in the same area, they can serve stores more frequently, enhancing store loyalty.
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> **2. Availability of a unified warehousing and distribution platform in the region:** Without a third-party warehousing and distribution platform, simply separating delivery from order-taking would require the distributor to hire additional delivery personnel. The high personnel and capital costs would limit the number of brands a distributor can represent, and the logic of one salesperson serving multiple brands would not exist.
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> Additionally, the increase in store visits means more and scattered orders, requiring multi-category and multi-brand delivery, i.e., unified warehousing and distribution. This reduces the delivery cost per order and improves delivery efficiency.
Besides traditional distributors expanding brands and categories to share their salespeople, we also see shared salesperson scenarios on B2B platforms. Matching platforms match orders and serve logistics. If such platforms lack strong logistics capabilities, order delivery costs will be high, making order matching difficult; even if completed, customers may have poor experiences. From this perspective, future true platforms are likely to emerge from professional urban distribution logistics companies.
**Summary: The prerequisite for sharing salespeople is a high degree of specialization of different functions among channel roles. Only then can salespeople focus on market service and create maximum value for each brand.**
**Are all brands suitable for sharing salespeople?**
Sharing salespeople is somewhat viable, but does it apply to all FMCG categories and brands? Not necessarily. For example, categories with low-temperature, short-shelf-life, and many SKUs are not suitable for shared salespeople serving terminals. The characteristics of such products require salespeople to have high professionalism and flexibility, but shared salespeople often cannot deeply cultivate a single category to achieve sufficient expertise.
Moreover, top-tier brands explicitly prohibit salespeople from "holding multiple jobs," while third- and fourth-tier brands prefer that top-tier brand salespeople also handle their own brands. In the author's early work experience, I even saw a regional manager of one brand encourage a salesperson from another top-tier brand to also handle their brand. Another executive from a deep-distribution brand bluntly stated: it's highly likely that deep-distribution brand salespeople are "being shared."
**So why are deep-distribution brands not suitable for sharing salespeople? New Distribution believes the main reasons are as follows:**
**1. Shared salespeople have relatively poor professional capabilities.**
FMCG categories are numerous, and even similar products from different brands can vary significantly. Brands with deep distribution systems have strict requirements for terminal display, inventory management, product shelf-life management, and brand promotion. Shared salespeople, without professional training and guidance, often fail to meet these requirements.
**2. The value of the distribution network in deep-distribution systems.**
Brands with deep distribution systems often invest heavily in network coverage, giving them an advantage over lower-tier brands. If deep-distribution brands use shared salespeople, it's equivalent to sharing their years of cultivated terminal resources with other brands, significantly weakening their channel network advantage.
**3. Deep-distribution brands have strong control over frontline salespeople, leaving little room for handling other brands.**
Take a deep-distribution brand I once worked for: the company strictly required dedicated personnel and vehicles, tracked everything via mobile phone positioning and assessment systems, and vivid display and store services occupied most of the work time. The company also evaluated salesperson performance based on time in store and number of stores visited, further limiting the space for shared salespeople.
It's undeniable that with rising labor costs and the emergence of specialized division of labor, shared salespeople have their rationality due to low cost, flexibility, and efficiency. However, given the current state of the FMCG industry, shared salespeople are not suitable for brands with deep distribution systems due to their lack of professional capability and low loyalty.
Brand owners must also clearly recognize this: **Although deep distribution has high labor costs, they cannot do without their own salespeople at the grassroots level. Without directly managed or strongly managed salespeople, the deep distribution system and its accumulated advantages would cease to exist.**
**On October 23-24, during the Autumn Sugar and Wine Fair, New Distribution will host the "2018 FMCG Urban Distribution Logistics Conference."** We will invite industry experts, FMCG warehousing and distribution specialists, and distributors who have transformed into unified warehousing and distribution platforms to discuss and answer questions about future trends in FMCG urban distribution logistics and practical cases of distributor transformation, hoping to bring you new insights and thoughts!
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