I'm delighted to share insights on internal management systems. A company's core competitiveness lies in its people, and the key to personnel competitiveness is effective management, which means rapidly improving human efficiency. This includes managing the marketing team, controlling marketing costs, process management, results management, settlement management, and more.
When salespeople visit the market, verification must outweigh trust. So how can companies effectively manage hundreds or thousands of salespeople? How can they use backend data to increase output? How can they maximize management capability with minimal management costs? Solving these problems naturally leads to the idea of a terminal management system for salespeople.
Let's first briefly introduce what a terminal system can bring to a company:
Attendance Management: Salespeople are in a highly mobile industry, including job mobility and personal mobility. Companies can use mobile terminal systems for clocking in and applying for attendance-related processes.
Clear Market Operations: You can view employee locations, trajectory processes, and route planning at any time, making it more objective.
Timely Process Approvals: Urgent matters can be handled anytime, avoiding delays that could miss opportunities.
More Intuitive Daily Reports: Rich in images and text, flexible comments, and timely corrections.
Clear Marketing Network: You can view customer deployment, understand market customer density, regional customer distribution, and query terminal customer inventory and sales at any time.
Full Control of Customer Business Dynamics: You can stay updated on customer visits, orders, sales, inventory, displays, and promotional acceptance.
Full Coverage of Regular Visits: Standardize and constrain skipping or missing stores, improve service quality, and effectively increase work efficiency.
Implementation of the Eight-Step Visit Process: Mechanize and modularize the visit process, similar to elementary school calligraphy practice, learning stroke by stroke.
High Efficiency of Mobile Ordering: Achieve mobile order taking and mobile vehicle sales, monitor inventory in real time, and optimize and timely delivery.
Closed-Loop Inventory Management: Fully integrate the product supply chain between the company and customers, understand real-time inventory and sales of each SKU, and synchronize data management.
More Accurate Terminal Sell-Through Data: Provide data support for the company's next market plan.
Real and Controllable Promotion Execution: Achieve refined management of promotion plans and schedules, send promotion tasks to stores, and collect on-site photos for expense verification.
The above issues are the most common challenges faced by all companies, and they are also system management modules that almost all terminal systems can provide. However, each system has its own strengths and weaknesses, with different emphases. So how can companies choose a mobile terminal system that suits their own problems?
Product development generally goes through four stages: Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline. I won't elaborate on the introduction and decline stages, as they are relatively short processes. Now I'll focus on how companies in the growth and maturity stages should choose a terminal system.
Let me give two examples to illustrate the functional requirements of terminal systems.
Jinmailang Beverage: In 2018, sales grew 46%, the highest growth rate among large enterprises in the industry, making it a worthy representative of fast-growing companies.
Nongfu Spring: The representative product for 2-yuan water, the absolute leader in the drinking water industry, and a worthy representative of mature companies.
As mentioned earlier: Companies in the growth stage focus more on market fundamentals, while companies in the maturity stage focus more on sales fundamentals. Of course, a qualified manager will grasp both, and both must be strong, but there is a trade-off, with different emphases. So how do Jinmailang and Nongfu Spring do this well? Or how do they use salesperson terminal systems to manage and achieve their fundamental work goals? Let's break it down one by one.
An eternal law: Where the assessment is, there the sales team's execution will be; where the rewards are, there the sales team's goals will be.
When choosing a terminal system, the first thought is: What functions do we need? What do we want employees to do? The general process is to first set assessment indicators based on your goals, and finally choose a terminal management system that suits you. So let's reverse-engineer the assessment indicators of these companies to see how to choose.
(1) First, look at the salary structure for Jinmailang Beverage salespeople paid by the company:
Basic salary + performance salary + process items + market operation score, four major components.
The basic salary is a low attendance wage. The performance salary is based on achieving all product targets, and monthly tasks are hard to exceed significantly. The process items assess the number and quality of outlets, worth only a few hundred yuan. So all salespeople must work hard on market operations to earn higher income. In 2015, excellent salespeople could earn more than 60% of their total income from market operations. For outsourced dealer workers, the income from market operation score rewards could even exceed the total of base salary plus commission.
So Jinmailang's goal is clear: to achieve rapid product sell-through, they focus heavily on market visualization, meaning they place great importance on building market fundamentals. Jinmailang invests hundreds of millions of yuan annually in rewards for maintaining market fundamentals.
What are market fundamentals?
Six Market Visit Actions in Market Fundamentals:
- Press the storefront: Check inventory.
- Stock the shelves: Check the width and depth of each SKU's facing.
- Enter the cooler: Check facing, bottle count, and layers.
- Create multiple displays: Cut-case displays, stack displays.
- Visualization: Set up POP, KT boards, bottle hangers, price tags, and other materials.
- Maintain cleanliness: Ensure product cleanliness.
Five Strengthened Traditional Channel Hands-On Actions in Market Fundamentals:
Lift: Reduce inventory by moving products from the warehouse to the door. Open: Transfer inventory by opening cases and stocking shelves for easy purchase. Cut: Cut-case displays. Stick: Set up visualization materials. Arrange: Arrange shelves and coolers.
Jinmailang quantifies and breaks down market fundamentals like this:
We can clearly see that for Jinmailang salespeople, market points are money. As long as they follow standardized operations, high income is guaranteed. Here we should introduce the Moli Hutong system used by Jinmailang salespeople. This system quantifies abstract market fundamentals, turning passive market work into proactive, habitual behavior. It fundamentally solves the problem of verifying employees' hands-on actions, increases the chance of products being purchased in stores, and enhances competitiveness for the last meter to the consumer.
(2) Next, look at the salary structure for Nongfu Spring salespeople paid by the company:
Basic salary + distribution achievement rate + average SKU count per order in route + active customer rate in route + key work goals
From the salary structure of Nongfu Spring's frontline salespeople, it's clear that as a mature company, most of Nongfu Spring's products rely on strong brand and product strength to penetrate various channels and outlets. Products are a proactive demand for consumers, so sell-through is not a major concern. What needs to be done is to ensure terminal stores are not out of stock (though this doesn't mean visualization is unimportant). What salespeople need to do is quickly increase the vertical growth space of products, i.e., the number of SKUs per store, ensure multi-SKU sales, and enhance single-store output. At this point, sales fundamentals become particularly important.
What are sales fundamentals?
Two Dimensions of Performance Growth:
Horizontal growth: The more outlets, the better. Vertical growth: The more SKUs per store, the better.
Two Formulas for Beverages:
Population / 300 = Number of outlets Number of outlets * Number of SKUs = Performance
(Note: The above is the 2015 assessment. Currently, to adapt to market conditions, Nongfu focuses on exclusive distribution, with the company providing base salary and dealers providing commission. The model is not of great reference value.)
For Nongfu Spring salespeople, market operations are another model: emphasizing single-store output. After arriving at the store, the main tasks are to check whether the store's inventory complies with the 1.5x inventory rule, whether there are missing SKUs, and whether an additional product or flavor can be added to the store. This is the focus of standardized operations. Here we must mention Nongfu Spring's OA system, which better enables quantitative tracking and verification of sales fundamentals, tracking daily order count, order amount, order SKU count, the 5 SKUs for water, visit success rate, single-store VPO, etc. It fundamentally strengthens employees' habit of checking in-store SKUs, gradually promoting the company's 40+ SKUs to terminal outlets, invisibly enhancing the store owner's ability to accept goods, and achieving the last meter of in-store sales.
The above two companies are typical representatives of the two major fundamentals, each with its own advantages. Of course, today we are only looking at systems from the perspective of basic operations, which is not comprehensive. Each terminal system has its own merits. For example, the Moli Hutong system used by Jinmailang focuses more on personnel management and improvement, while the OA system used by Nongfu Spring focuses more on dealer inventory management. So how should a company leader, especially a small or medium-sized trading company, choose a more suitable system from the wide variety of mobile terminal software providers?
Let's answer this question from the beginning. Many company leaders, when choosing a terminal system, directly invite several terminal software company representatives to introduce the advantages of their software, then weigh and choose the one with more advantages. This is actually a big mistake, because the best is not necessarily suitable for your company; only what suits your company is the best.
Undoubtedly, when choosing a terminal system, you should first systematically analyze and explore your own purpose. Some trading companies may see others using software and want to get one too; some may not have software in internal management and want to reduce employees' statistical workload; some may have used terminal management software before, but as the business scale expands, the original software can no longer meet needs; some may hope to accelerate terminal sales speed and strengthen financial management in operations. But before implementing a system, the following questions must be clarified:
- How long has the trading company been established? How solid is its regional market foundation?
- Are the company's finance, platform clerk, and warehouse personnel fully staffed?
- How many SKUs does the company sell?
- Does the main sales product account for more than 60% or less? Is it in the growth or maturity stage?
- Can the product structure complement each other between off-peak and peak seasons? Do employees have work all year round?
- What is the team atmosphere like?
- How many people are on the team? How many business modules are there?
- Does the team have attitude problems or skill problems in sales?
- What is the most urgent change needed now?
For example:
A trading company without warehouse and clerk staff is not recommended to implement a terminal system.
A trading company whose main product is Master Kong beverages should focus on systems that emphasize sales fundamentals.
A trading company with only 5-8 people on the team is not recommended to implement a terminal system.
A trading company with many relatives and friends, where sales attitude is a problem, should focus on systems that emphasize market fundamentals.
In summary, by analogizing the company's current situation, you can choose a more suitable system based on your own needs. With the right approach, you'll get twice the result with half the effort! Information technology has transformative power. Through terminal management systems, FMCG companies can greatly reduce communication costs, improve the accuracy and timeliness of channel and terminal data, and improve sales forecast accuracy. They can also effectively control expense investment and increase output. At the same time, it helps companies standardize work processes, improve collaboration efficiency, and provide richer analytical basis for business decisions. I wish friends in the trading industry can spread their wings for career development by equipping themselves with appropriate terminal system information tools!
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China FMCG + Internet Professional New Media
Dedicated to FMCG manufacturer and distributor transformation and channel digital solutions