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Introduction: Xiao Chen is a sales representative for a small snack food company. After the initial development phase in his territory, it has now entered a deep cultivation stage. The company requires him not only to manage two primary distributors but also to obtain information on secondary distributors and help them with distribution. Recently, the company asked Xiao Chen to work with the primary distributors to distribute products, aiming to increase coverage and market share, while also understanding the capabilities and levels of downstream customers, gradually participating in their management to better serve the enterprise.
More and more companies are requiring sales representatives who manage distributors to also help distributors visit downstream customers or key terminals, in order to refine work, deepen market management, implement policies more thoroughly, and help both distributors and their own sales staff break old habits of "sitting and waiting" or "not managing." This presents a new challenge for these sales reps: how to assist distributors in jointly managing downstream customers?
- Effective Establishment of Visit Systems: Overall, the comprehensive quality of distributor groups is not as high as that of enterprises. Many distributors have deficiencies in management, and their visit management for sales reps is not as proficient as that of enterprises. It is often said that enterprises manage people through systems. Therefore, establishing a reasonable visit system is crucial.
Many enterprises promote regional visits and route visits, classifying customers and terminals, with clear guidelines for visit content and work at each terminal or customer. Even responses to various problems and objections are guided by so-called instructions. In this way, selecting parts of the enterprise's visit system and establishing a complete visit system at the distributor level provides a standardized platform for sales reps to assist distributors in visits, facilitating communication between both parties.
- Effective Establishment of Management Systems and Tools: Enterprises typically manage distributors through agreements, regional constraints, and rebate incentives. Sales reps can assist distributors in establishing a downstream customer management system, enhancing the distributor's status and management capabilities.
Management tools are systems that organize, digitize, and informatize management, commonly involving forms to fill out. The greatest benefit of management tools is integrating different information, processing it for analysis, providing a basis for market decisions, and changing the bad habit of making decisions "by gut feeling."
Although distributors may not be as formal as enterprises, they can accept basic management procedures. Many distributors have now awakened and imitated enterprise management by applying similar procedures, tools, systems, and techniques to their downstream customers. This is commendable and valuable experience. In fact, company-style management is the future direction for distributors.
With visit systems, management systems, and tools in place, sales reps can jointly manage downstream customers with distributors, removing major obstacles and providing distributors with free access to enterprise management wisdom they previously sought.
- Division of Labor and Cooperation: In social development, division of labor and cooperation are eternal themes. Since enterprises do not implement direct sales with full management, division of labor and cooperation with distributors are inevitable.
Joint management of downstream customers should leverage each party's strengths to maximize resource outcomes. Both parties have their own strengths, as listed below:
[Image: A diagram showing strengths of enterprises and distributors]
From the above, joint management of downstream customers allows both parties to leverage their advantages, achieving strong collaboration and a promising vision of invincibility.
Of course, if enterprises can transfer their strengths to distributors through cooperation, gradually cultivating them into powerful distributors, enterprises might even confidently withdraw, which is also a desirable outcome.
- Assisting Group Formation: If distributors, due to practical reasons, cannot establish a management system, enterprise sales reps can negotiate with downstream distributors to form a "Distributor Association" or similar grassroots organization, led by distributors, as a self-management approach. This form will grow with market progress.
Enterprises can also take the lead and organize, with distributors eventually managing. If the enterprise believes there is a basis for cooperation among all distributors in the region, it can propose a "group" plan, requiring members to contribute to a group activity fund, regularly conduct activities, organize consultations, and summarize market conditions. The primary distributor would serve as the association president, with the enterprise's sales rep or supervisor as vice president. During activities, the enterprise can provide guidance, regulate distributor market operations from the product owner's perspective, conduct training, brainstorm, and discuss market issues. This deepens relationships among the three levels (actually three levels in the channel chain), avoids friction between different or same levels, and effectively solves the problem of difficult channel management and entry.
Assisting distributors in management has become a key issue elevated to a high level by enterprises. When enterprises find that competitors can clone their product, price, promotion strategies within a day and use them against them, the initiator becomes the victim. Lack of core competitiveness is a pain point for many enterprises.
Only channel establishment, channel relationship cultivation, channel management standardization, and deep channel model implementation are difficult for competitors to clone and hard to achieve in the short term. In channel management, it's a process of fast fish eating slow fish, and since it's hard to establish quickly, it reflects an enterprise's core competitiveness for a period.
Therefore, it is urgent to quickly develop plans, deepen channel management, starting with enterprise sales reps assisting primary distributors in managing downstream customers, and gradually progressing. This is an urgent marketing issue today.
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