---
title: "Interview with C&S Paper's Yang Senlin: Digging into 5% High-Potential Stores, Low-Cost Market Growth of 67%"
description: "From January to September, in the Hefei market, C&S Paper achieved a maximum monthly growth of 106% and an overall business growth of 67% year-on-year. This was the result of the company's smart retail pilot project in 2024. The core strategy, as explained by CIO Yang Senlin, was to focus on helping distributors sell more goods more effectively, using digital tools to identify high-potential stores and match products to consumer demand."
author: "周群"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2025-01-03"
language: "en"
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# Interview with C&S Paper's Yang Senlin: Digging into 5% High-Potential Stores, Low-Cost Market Growth of 67%

> From January to September, in the Hefei market, C&S Paper achieved a maximum monthly growth of 106% and an overall business growth of 67% year-on-year. This was the result of the company's smart retail pilot project in 2024. The core strategy, as explained by CIO Yang Senlin, was to focus on helping distributors sell more goods more effectively, using digital tools to identify high-potential stores and match products to consumer demand.

First, let's share a set of data: "From January to September, in the Hefei market, C&S Paper achieved a maximum monthly growth of 106%, with overall business growing 67% year-on-year."

This data comes from C&S Paper's smart retail project, piloted in Hefei, Anhui in 2024. In today's market environment, such numbers are undoubtedly impressive.

How did they do it? Mr. Yang Senlin, CIO of C&S Paper and CEO of Siwei Huohua, told New Distribution that the core lies in focusing on one thing: **helping distributors sell more goods, and sell them better.** This may sound simple, but truly implementing it well required the digital team to repeatedly overturn and rebuild models, eventually summarizing a complete methodology through continuous trial and error. How was it implemented? New Distribution conducted an exclusive interview with Mr. Yang Senlin, and this article shares the Hefei pilot case with you, hoping to provide some inspiration.

In today's market, there is widespread pessimism in the industry because business is indeed difficult. Distributors, in particular, are in a tough position. Manufacturers apply pressure, various channels squeeze prices and compete for traffic, and every so often the rhetoric of "eliminating the middleman" resurfaces. But can the middleman truly be eliminated, overturning China's decades-old distribution system? The answer is definitely no. China's vast and complex market makes it unimaginably costly for manufacturers to achieve full coverage on their own. The existence of distributors is itself the optimal solution that manufacturers have discovered. Yang Senlin told New Distribution that the original intention behind C&S Paper's smart retail project was precisely the recognition of the importance of distributors in the distribution system. From a market perspective, to achieve sustained business growth, the first problem to solve is: **How to continuously help distributors sell more goods?** A key part of solving this problem is **empowering distributors through digitalization.** Many companies are advancing digitalization, but most tend to fall into the trap of turning it into a tool that constrains distributors. **The purpose of digitalization is not simply to replace the "carriage" with a "car"; the core is to teach distributors how to use the "car" well to boost their business.** How does C&S Paper help distributors make good use of this digital "car"?

**The first action: Focus on "high-potential stores."** Hefei has over 16,000 shopping outlets, but C&S Paper's own sales team has only about 20 people. To achieve full coverage, each person would need to manage 800+ outlets, which is not only impractical but also unsustainable in terms of costs. Distributors face various issues when dealing with such a complex market environment.

> **When managing 10 stores, managing people, goods, and premises is easy;**
>
> **When managing 100 stores, it's still manageable;**
>
> **When managing 1,000 stores, matching people, goods, and premises is always a problem;**
>
> **When managing 3,000 stores, it becomes a headache;**
>
> **When managing 10,000 stores, it's a disaster.**

In a market like Hefei, the number of stores is indeed large, but how many are effective outlets and how many are ineffective? How to deploy personnel and allocate expenses? Often, only after taking action do you realize that the input-output ratio is not proportional, and you have to start over. So here we need to consider a question: **Which is more important, store quantity or store quality?** Let's look at a piece of data: the overall closure rate of stores in the Hefei market is 13%. This means that if you cover stores indiscriminately, many will eventually close or disappear, leading to uncollectible receivables. From this perspective, store quality is definitely very important. **For distributors, the loss from one store closure may not be compensated by the profits from ten high-quality stores.** From the perspective of sales growth, let's share a formula: **Sales revenue = Number of active stores * Monthly average POS * (1 - Channel profit) + New channel inventory** It can be seen that the key factor is "stores." There are two key terms here: "active stores" and "POS." Stores that are active and have high sales determine the total sales revenue. Therefore, to achieve market growth, the first step is to **help distributors find quality stores.** We define such stores as **high-potential stores.** The more high-potential stores a distributor cultivates, the more goods they can naturally sell.

**How to find high-potential stores?**

**The answer is: use data models to screen them.**

C&S Paper cooperated with leading internet companies in the industry to obtain full data on sales points across China. Then, based on population profiles, districts, multiple tags, and product tags, they combined and re-ranked the data to form a precise algorithm and model to screen out corresponding high-potential stores. You might wonder, **Is the accuracy of the algorithm and model guaranteed?** First, the initial data itself has an accuracy of over 70%, and the digital team conducted repeated data cleaning and offline secondary verification, ensuring stable data precision. Second, for store determination, there are 18 potential tags, such as active foot traffic index, surrounding business cluster index, etc., plus over 2,000 population profile tags, resulting in a scientific and objective outcome. For example, in the Hefei market, the tag screening combinations were very detailed: within 800 meters, there must be 6 buildings, each with no fewer than 32 floors; within 500 meters, there must be 8 restaurants, 1 barbershop, and 1 milk tea shop; within 5 kilometers, there must be a hospital; within 10 kilometers, there must be a university; the occupancy rate must be no less than 60%; and the proportion of sophisticated moms and white-collar workers must be no less than 45%. Ultimately, through the algorithm model, they screened out 894 high-potential stores from Hefei's 16,000+ stores, with a closure rate of less than 5%. Based on the high-potential store data, they looked back at C&S Paper's coverage in Hefei. Among the 894 high-potential stores, distributors had already covered 300, accounting for only 34%. **Finding uncovered high-potential stores is equivalent to identifying incremental opportunities for distributors.** Distributors can achieve lower-cost, high-quality precise store coverage, with limited sales teams focusing on breaking through high-potential stores, reducing resource waste and distraction.

**The second action: "Find the right people and select the right products."** Finding the store is only finding the growth point. Ensuring product sell-through in the store is what truly drives sales growth. Sell-through, at its root, solves the problem: **Why can't consumers buy the product at the price we want to sell it to them when they enter the store?** Essentially, it's still the "people, goods, and premises" issue: selecting the right goods, in the right place, to sell to the right people. Here, distributors need to understand a viewpoint: **A place with many people may be bustling, but your business may not necessarily thrive.** For example, there is a store that is indeed a high-potential store with high foot traffic and good daily revenue. You then stock facial tissue, but it doesn't sell at all, causing significant inventory pressure and reluctance to reorder. Where is the problem? The products you stocked do not match the customer base. The main consumers near this high-potential store are elderly people who habitually use core-filled toilet paper; facial tissue does not align with their consumption habits. So, it is crucial that **when the location (high-potential store) is determined, the core is to solve the matching of goods and people.** C&S Paper's digital team re-analyzed the population profiles around various high-potential stores in Hefei and divided them into 12 categories. By integrating and fusing population profiles, districts, store tags, and product tags, they moved from big data product recommendations to intelligent pricing, and to precise allocation of big data expenses and brand promotion, making the market actions of C&S Paper's sales team and distributors in Hefei more effective. At the same time, through digital empowerment of sales, they helped distributors and stores increase sales and profits, achieving a win-win in both volume and profit. New Distribution has consistently emphasized in previous articles that **in the current market, distributors must understand consumers; only by knowing consumer needs can they do business well.** Through digital tools, C&S Paper essentially enables distributors to find where consumers are (high-potential stores), understand what those consumers need (population tags), and then, based on their product structure, price reasonably to match those needs, thereby boosting sales and profits. The final results also prove the value that C&S Paper's smart retail business model brings to distributors. As a weak market for C&S Paper, Hefei achieved a counter-trend high growth of 67% from January to September 2024, without adding a single person or incurring additional expenses.

**In conclusion**

In the practice of the Hefei market, C&S Paper's digital team also summarized a set of standardized processes and strategies, and made further optimization strategies. For example, the "high-potential district" approach for strong markets, digital empowerment strategies for distributors of different sizes (large, medium, and small), how distributors can combine tags to define high-potential stores, and how different categories can apply smart retail. However, due to space limitations, many details of C&S Paper's Hefei market practice cases and optimized strategies cannot be fully elaborated here.

**On January 10, 2025, New Distribution will organize a "Regional Distributor Growth Benchmark Study Tour Training Class" to visit C&S Paper's Hefei market, see cases, visit stores, and listen to explanations.**

**At that time, C&S Paper's CFO Gao Bo, CIO Yang Senlin, as well as the Anhui regional general manager and benchmark distributors, will also share the Hefei pilot case and implementation path on-site.**

**Interested distributor friends are welcome to scan the QR code to register and participate. If you have questions, you can get them answered face-to-face on-site!**


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