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Closing the Sale The main reasons for failed deals include: missing the opportunity to propose, talking too much, and poor sales performance. Timing issues in closing:

  • Early stage: The customer already has a lot of information and just wants to ask a few questions.
  • Middle stage: During the process, you notice signs that the potential customer is ready to buy.
  • Late stage: The prospect is buying your product for the first time or knows very little about it.

Bargaining: Refers to the buyer's behavior of commenting on the seller's quote and explanation, then requesting a "re-quote" or "improved quote."

  • "Testing the waters": After the seller makes an offer, the buyer does not immediately counter-offer but asks about the price under various hypothetical conditions. This maintains a "peaceful and trusting" atmosphere and helps the buyer better understand the seller's position before making a counter-offer.
  • "Strict demands": The buyer rigorously examines the seller's product from all aspects, raises many issues in the transaction, and demands the seller improve the quote.

Counter-offer: Refers to the seller, after responding to the buyer's bargaining with a new quote, asking the buyer for their price opinion.

  • For "testing the waters": Find out what the buyer really wants to buy; do not immediately evaluate hypothetical requests; if the other party throws out a "stone," immediately ask for their order as a condition.
  • For "strict demands": Be patient, find loopholes and false statements in the other party's questions, explain truthfully, and counter with your own questions and requirements.

Sales Process Management Now that we understand the entire sales process, we need to control and manage the whole process. For companies operating through agents (distributors), sales process management is particularly important. It is mainly reflected in the following aspects:

Ensuring the Achievement of Sales Goals The fundamental purpose of sales management is to achieve sales goals in a controllable manner. The key lies in two aspects: A. Sales goals and their breakdown: See Chapter 1 of Market Management for setting goals and breaking them down. B. Process tracking and control: Track and control the sales process to understand the dynamics and progress of daily sales work, detect abnormal phenomena and problems early, and solve them immediately. The main purpose of sales process management is to emphasize the relationship between goals and actual performance, and to ensure the achievement of sales goals through tracking and monitoring the sales process.

Territory Management and Time Management Territory management gives the process a foothold. Most companies, especially in the FMCG industry, have their own key regional markets, which typically consist of offices, salespeople, distributors, sub-distributors, terminals, and consumers. The main purpose of regional market management is to improve sales efficiency, develop and manage the market comprehensively, and implement refined marketing.

Time management is an important part of sales process management, from annual tracking down to monthly, weekly, and even daily tracking. Time management is mainly used to grasp the rhythm and progress of sales work. How to achieve efficient time management: First, break down annual and monthly plans into weekly plans. Each day's work should have clear goals and implementation plans; classify customers and visit them according to plan. For regional managers, break down monthly and weekly plans, clarify your weekly itinerary, key issues to solve, and corresponding strategies and measures. People's energy is limited, so focus your main energy on areas that generate the greatest benefits.

[Case Study] At a sales meeting, a very hardworking and diligent salesperson said that his territory was large, with about 500 customers in total, and he could visit about 300 customers a week, which was already overloaded. But sales performance was still poor, and it was difficult to achieve monthly sales targets. After the meeting, I talked with him in detail about his daily work and found a big problem: this diligent salesperson visited terminals by area every day, covering all registered customers in an area. I told him that this was inefficient, but he said, "Didn't you say during training to follow the eight-step terminal visit method, without omission or repetition?" It turned out that most of his energy was spent on unproductive customers.

I told him that the eight-step visit also requires customer classification. Some customers need a weekly visit; some may need a visit every three days; and some may only need a visit every half month. It depends on the customer's sales situation. I helped him classify the 500 terminals into A, B, and C categories. A and B terminals were visited once a week, with some A terminals visited every three days; C terminals were visited once every half month, with some once a month. Why? Because some C terminals sell less than one case of your product a month, and visiting them daily only annoys the owner. It's unnecessary to spend a lot of time on such terminals. Focus your main energy on visiting and serving A-class customers.

After this adjustment, not only could he visit all 500 terminals in a month, but sales and satisfaction among key customers improved significantly.

Salesperson Process Management A. Weekly Visit Plan: After understanding the company's assigned sales targets and policies, salespeople formulate a weekly visit plan, including the areas, routes, and times for planned customer visits; the content and purpose of visits (developing new customers, information collection, payment collection, service, problem resolution, ordering, or others). These should be carefully filled in on the "Weekly Visit Plan Form," which must be signed by the supervisor.

B. Daily Visit Report: After work, salespeople fill in the "Daily Visit Report" with details such as attendance, results of customer negotiations, customer problem handling, actual performance and ratios for payment collection or order targets, competitor market information, customer feedback, latest customer developments, and today's visit insights. This report is then signed and commented on by the supervisor. Sales managers can know what salespeople plan to do each day through the "Customer Visit Plan" and how they performed through the "Daily Sales Report." This is the first process management.

C. Weekly Market Briefing: Conducted weekly. During customer visits, salespeople gather useful information, such as consumer feedback on products, competitors' new promotions or new products, serious distributor complaints, and personnel changes at customer companies. In addition to filling this in the daily visit report, if the situation is serious enough to affect product sales, they should immediately fill out a market condition report or customer complaint handling report to quickly report to superiors.

D. Weekly Progress Control: To keep the company informed of sales dynamics, regional business managers (supervisors) submit a sales management report every Monday, reporting on the week's market conditions. This includes sales target achievement, number of new customers developed, payment collection, effective visit rate, weekly sales volume, major competitive conditions, handling of abnormal customers, submission and reporting of various forms this week, and next week's goals and plans. This is the weekly progress control for middle managers. The quality and timeliness of salespeople's report filling should be included in their performance evaluation, so that business supervisors can cover all aspects in process management and progress tracking.

E. Sales Meetings: Sales meetings are an important method and means of sales process management, mainly including morning meetings, weekly meetings, monthly meetings, quarterly meetings, and annual meetings; there are also special topic meetings. Since business supervisors need to stay updated on the latest market information and sales issues, morning meetings should be highly valued. Morning meetings are mainly held in regional markets, attended by regional supervisors and managers. If middle and senior management are touring the regional market, they should preferably attend. After understanding each salesperson's work situation, business supervisors should provide guidance, correction, and help to underperforming salespeople and new salespeople regarding their work attitude and efficiency.

Morning meetings should not be a one-way talk; nor should they end after everyone has raised issues. Problems should be analyzed and solutions found. If they cannot be solved on the spot, they should be recorded, reported to superiors, and the results communicated at the next meeting. If problems are only discussed or left unresolved, salespeople will stop identifying, analyzing, or raising issues in future morning meetings, because if they can't be solved anyway, why bother?

Weekly meetings mainly summarize the week's work, achievement of phased sales targets, problems and solutions, and conduct routine and special training, as well as experience sharing among sales staff.

Monthly meetings bring together all office personnel in the region, rotating locations, and invite middle-level staff to participate. For example, if an office performed well that month, a monthly meeting is held there, including business discussions, summaries, next-stage ideas, and on-site market observation.

Annual meetings are not detailed here, as they are meetings for the entire company's marketing department, covering many aspects, mainly including annual summaries and plans and measures for the next year.