Every season, various data points stimulate distributors. But after a while, when you ask about these products, you find they've disappeared from the market. Why? Experts say that each year, tens of thousands of new products appear, but less than 1% survive. The 1% that survive don't do so because they are better than the 99% that fail, but because their sales teams know how to adjust product layout and structure appropriately. In the off-season, mastering these practical strategies can help you make your business boom!
1 Product Integration Has Potential
The off-season is the best time to sort out and integrate products within your region. Because sales are relatively stable and slow, adjusting product layout and structure moderately won't have a major impact on market sales.
1. Select new products to create new profit points. In the off-season, most manufacturers and distributors adopt conservative contraction strategies. At this time, launching new products often faces less competition, making it easier to enter the market and build momentum. Moreover, new products give salespeople and distributors a fresh feeling and new motivation, ultimately bringing new growth points to the market and increasing overall sales.
2. Adjust old products, survival of the fittest. Some aging products that are not profitable are "tasteless to eat, but a pity to discard." However, because they hold a certain market share, during the peak season when everything is selling well, you may not dare to make changes. In the off-season, you can use the opportunity of new product launches to eliminate the weak and keep the strong. By promoting new products to replace old ones, you can ensure a smooth transition and connection between new and old products.
2 Terminal Distribution is Key
After product adjustments, you also need to take action on distribution. New product distribution requires attention to the following:
1. Ensure basic terminal display fees. Price is the most dominant factor in new product distribution. Distributors should guarantee basic fees monthly, control core terminals, and give different levels of rewards to terminal stores of different sizes.
2. Grasp core secondary distributors. In the early stages of new product distribution, it's difficult to achieve quick sell-through. At this time, the importance of channel construction, promotional momentum, and consumer cultivation becomes prominent. Rely on secondary distributors with greater strength for distribution, set reasonable profit margins for them, and make them more motivated in promotion, achieving a win-win situation.
3. Actively expand township and rural markets. With the improvement of consumption levels in counties, townships, and villages, consumers' brand awareness is gradually awakening. The consumption potential of township markets is also increasing. Regional distributors should intensively cultivate township markets, send key business personnel to visit markets more often, maintain good relationships with township terminals, and continuously improve the sell-through network for new products in township markets.
3 Channel Expansion is Timely
After launching new products, to achieve good market performance in the off-season, actively expanding and broadening channels is essential. In the off-season, competitors are relatively conservative, which is precisely a good opportunity for us to develop channels and expand networks. Expanding and broadening channels mainly includes the following:
1. Establish "enemy-occupied base areas." In the off-season, distributors often neglect network maintenance. Take this opportunity to seize competitors' sales outlets and continuously expand your own sales network. You can attract competitors' customers to join by offering special preferential policies with new product distribution, laying the foundation for market growth.
2. Seize blank outlets. Aim to cover all blank outlets in townships and streets within the region, implementing street-by-street distribution. In the peak season, everyone focuses on promotions and shipments, making it hard to spare energy to seize blank outlets. Develop and cover these outlets comprehensively... In this way, when the peak season arrives, with many new outlets added, quantity changes lead to quality changes, potentially bringing unexpected surprises.
3. Open a "second battlefield." That is, use the off-season to vigorously develop special channels or pathways. By broadening channels, products can enter more sales channels, increasing opportunities for consumers to come into contact with the products, subtly entering the minds of target consumer groups, thereby increasing sales.
4 Brand Promotion Cannot Be Neglected
Generally, companies and distributors engage in explosive brand promotion during the peak season, but once the peak season passes, they don't want to invest in promotion. This provides us with an opportunity for low-cost promotion. If you adopt short-term, high-density promotion in the regional market, you can achieve unexpected results.
However, for many small micro-terminal stores, the main promotional method is in-store posters, which represent the product's selling points and the company's image. If you want to make posters the "face" of the product, you need to pay attention to the following principles:
From left to right When posting posters, if there are symmetrical stacking areas in the store, try to post the poster on the left side of the symmetrical object. Reasons: It conforms to people's habit of reading from left to right; when posters are posted on symmetrical parts, the right side is more likely to be damaged, with a higher probability of destruction than the left.
Don't avoid key points Poster posting in key stores aims to establish a strong brand image, enter consumers' field of vision first, and compete with competitors for consumer attention. Whoever enters the consumer's consideration set first gains the initiative.
Timely "subsidies" Personnel responsible for poster posting should be familiar with competitors' subsidy times, communicate with sales points in a timely manner, know yourself and know your enemy, and always understand competitors' posting trends; when competing for poster areas, try to cover rather than tear down competitors' posters.
5 Market Maintenance Should Be Preserved
"Peak season for sales volume, off-season for market" is an unwritten rule within companies. In the off-season, manufacturers and distributors have more time, making it a good opportunity to maintain customer relationships and consolidate the market.
1. Provide good service. In the off-season, strengthening customer service is the most effective means for salespeople to gain customer favor and preference. But no matter what service, it must be what customers care about and need. For example, in-store shelf management and cleaning, if done well, can improve the distributor's and brand's image.
2. Standardize service. The off-season is a good time to standardize service. Through off-season sales, salespeople should further clarify visit steps, operating standards, and processes. High-standard service can differentiate from competitors, help enhance brand image, and make customers remember you more deeply.
3. Maintain customer relationships. Since the off-season has ample time, salespeople can take advantage of significant and memorable occasions such as customers' weddings, births, birthdays, children's schooling, etc., "act when it's time to act," to build good personal relationships with customers, thereby making customers more loyal to the company, selling more vigorously, and increasing their loyalty to the company and brand. Strengthening and deepening customer relationships in the off-season is the most direct way for salespeople to make their products stand out quickly and achieve maximum sales.
Internal Management Must Be Valued; Fire in the Backyard Is a Big Deal
In the peak season, there is no time or energy for refined management of the team. After the peak season, it provides an opportunity to stabilize morale and consolidate internal management, to improve combat effectiveness and cohesion for the next peak season.
1 "Oh my god, employees, don't leave!"
After a period of peak sales, salespeople become relatively relaxed, and even a large number of employees choose to resign. The main reasons are: with the off-season approaching, the economic loss from resignation is relatively small; after the peak season, they are physically tired and want to rest and consider their next career plans. Faced with this situation, distributors are anxious. When people are united, the business thrives. For distributors, personnel management at this time is particularly important.
1. Help employees sort out long-standing grievances at work. During daily work, employees inevitably encounter conflicts from internal or external sources. If these are not resolved for a long time, they will accumulate. Distributors should use a tabular format to let employees report problems encountered at work centrally, discuss them by category, and help employees sort them out.
2. Be a down-to-earth boss and communicate more with employees. In personnel management, face-to-face communication with employees is the most cost-saving method. It not only brings the superior-subordinate relationship closer but also helps eliminate misunderstandings and facilitates timely feedback of employee issues.
3. Pay attention to employees' career prospects. Surveys show that employees who leave after working for more than 2 years mainly do so because they cannot continue to improve themselves or learn new skills in their original positions; those who leave after 5-10 years often do so because they see no career prospects and cannot explore promotion possibilities in routine work.
2 "Work hard, and you'll be paid well!"
This part is closely related to the resignation wave above. If business personnel's pay is not proportional to their efforts, they may develop the idea of resigning. When setting compensation standards for staff, distributors should consider the following factors:
1. Team size. Make comprehensive considerations based on your own business scale and team capabilities, ensuring everyone does their own job, neither wasting talent nor being redundant.
2. Set sales targets. Reasonable sales targets can motivate employees and are necessary planning for enterprise development.
3. Allocate market and product resources. Allocate different markets and products according to different salespeople's abilities, which helps leverage their initiative and facilitates more precise assessment.
4. My expectations and goal setting. What is the planned base salary? What is the minimum expected task volume? If the target task amount is completed, what is the planned reward?
5. Set up a compensation assessment mechanism. For example, minimum target, assessment target, and sprint target. What is the salary for completing the minimum target? What is the salary for completing the assessment target? What is the salary for completing the sprint target? Convert these numbers into formulas. For example, complete the minimum target with a 3% reward, complete the assessment target with a 4% reward, and complete the sprint target with a 5% reward.
3 "Assessment! How can we pay without assessment!"
In the off-season, there is another crucial core task that needs to be done well and solidly. It is the prerequisite for keeping off-season sales from declining or even growing. This task is the sales assessment for the off-season market. In the off-season, the laziness of salespeople will be fully exposed, especially some old employees who "have great potential" in attendance, travel, etc. Therefore, strict management and assessment of salespeople must be done in the off-season.
1. Attendance is the foundation. Link basic salaries to attendance, implement daily reporting, use local fixed-line phones for reporting, and if conditions allow, consider installing "attendance software" on employees' phones to ensure they are in the market.
2. Distribution rate is a requirement. As long as the market and channels have a high distribution rate, it will give the target audience a certain impact in terms of momentum and senses. Especially, terminal display of products should be done well. Through vivid and activated terminals, product visibility and frequency of contact with consumers can be improved, thereby increasing sales opportunities. So distribution rate is a core requirement and important standard for assessing salespeople.
3. Product structure should be a bonus. In the off-season, product sales volume may decline, but if the product structure is adjusted well, sales revenue can be maintained. To achieve this, it is necessary to assess salespeople's product structure indicators. By reasonably planning the proportion of high, medium, and low-end products, the goal of reducing off-season sales volume while maintaining turnover and profit can be achieved.
4 "Training is essential; you are the best!"
Distributors using the off-season for training is also a necessary task. In the peak season, salespeople are often busy with product delivery and payment collection, but in the off-season, they have plenty of time. Therefore, using the off-season, you can organize a series of targeted training activities to "recharge" salespeople.
Use the off-season to train salespeople and promoters on marketing skills, mindset adjustment, etc. Sales managers should also take the lead as speakers and be good at using meetings for training.
In off-season sales, salespeople are crucial because they are the executors of the distributor's strategies and tactics, and product sales depend on them. Therefore, training salespeople is also a strategic investment in the off-season market for distributors. For example, you can train them on practical skills and methods such as how to distribute and manage shelves, how to recommend new products, and how to sell more profitable products. By improving the operational skills of distributor business personnel, you can enable them to confidently carry out market promotion in the off-season and do every bit of daily work well.
Sharpening the axe will not delay the work of cutting wood. Through training and improving the quality of the marketing team, you can enhance the operational skills of marketing personnel and promote the overall market sales increase.
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