Recently, many peers have asked me the same question: how to increase beverage sales in local county-level markets. This is a representative issue in the industry, so I will share my experience and briefly discuss methods to boost beverage sales in county markets for reference.

Any national beverage brand grows from a regional one; only by first succeeding regionally can it go national, except for Hengda Ice Spring. How Hengda Ice Spring went national is not discussed here.

The most representative regional market is the county-level market (including administrative districts of prefecture-level cities). There are 2,400 county-level administrative units in China. Succeeding in county markets is a necessary path for all beverage companies to become national brands. So how can sales in county markets be increased? This is also a direction of FMCG marketing that I study, namely regional breakthrough marketing. Since each county market has different actual conditions, I will analyze from the perspective of marketing push and pull. The local market must gradually solve the following links: enthusiasm, coverage, display, willingness to buy, and buying more. These links are closely connected and indispensable. A brief analysis is as follows:

Enthusiasm

To accomplish anything, relying on one person is not enough; you need a team. How to improve the sales enthusiasm of the team is paramount. The team here refers to frontline salespeople, who can be salespeople of distributors or deep distribution sales representatives in the local offices of the enterprise. The team size can be 2-3 people or more than 5 people. This requires our local regional managers to continuously train and guide from both spiritual and material aspects, enhance personal confidence, stimulate team fighting spirit, clarify team goals, and break them down to each team member. It is important to follow the principle of more encouragement and less punishment. Commissions, distribution rewards, etc., should be clear and distributed promptly. Set examples, share experience, increase confidence, and then sales will increase.

I have always appreciated a saying: "An excellent team has no failed individuals; a failed team has no excellent individuals." It is essential to instill the idea of shared honor and disgrace into every team member's mind, improve each person's individual combat capability, and the overall team performance will naturally rise. Of course, for those with negative and pessimistic emotions in the team, they must be resolutely removed, otherwise they will bring great harm to the team.

Coverage

Coverage solves the possession of terminal networks. Therefore, our regional managers need to survey the local terminal network. This work is already mature in the FMCG industry and has developed a series of methods to control terminal stores, especially the channel refinement brought by Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Master Kong, which divides terminal networks in detail, such as schools, internet cafes, restaurants, scenic spots, traditional stores, townships, etc. I won't go into detail here.

However, I want to point out the effective coverage of beverages. Does every channel need to sell our products?

No, according to the packaging and price of beverages, we should selectively enter stores, that is, effective coverage.

Canned beverages should occupy terminal restaurants; selling in terminal circulation stores and scenic spots is more difficult. Terminal circulation stores should mainly focus on PET bottles, which are convenient to carry and can be put in bags if not finished. Community stores should focus on whole-box purchases and increase the promotion of gift boxes. And so on. This requires our frontline sales personnel to understand effective network coverage to increase sales.

Display

Beverage consumption is impulsive. At a time when brands are homogeneous, how to capture consumers' purchasing psychology and make them willing to buy our brand's beverages is currently a difficulty in marketing for all brands.

Everyone is making great efforts to seize terminal shelves and freezers, invest in terminal shelves, make store signs for terminal stores, post posters at doors, set up umbrellas outside stores, hang banners, buy the largest display area on in-store shelves, and cut-box displays at counters. All the tricks that can be thought of have been thought of, with the only purpose of attracting attention. But are these really useful?

Let's put ourselves in the shoes of an ordinary consumer. Do you remember which brand's display you saw in a terminal store today?

Right, there are too many brands, and you simply can't remember.

The only purpose of maximizing display is to attract consumers to buy. Since everyone is fighting for display space, consumers no longer remember. Can we save this expense and use it to create a series of fun, interesting, and interactive things that reflect consumer engagement? Therefore, I suggest that peers seriously consider making terminal displays more interesting based on the different characteristics of their respective brands.

Willingness to Buy

Consumers go through two stages when buying beverages: trial purchase and habitual purchase. We need to analyze which stage our respective brands are in.

In the trial purchase stage, we should create a series of promotional activities to encourage consumers to buy, such as tasting, buy-one-get-one, etc., to increase sales. I suggest that consumers should have an interesting understanding of the product and buy it. For example, in July 2012, when I was the General Manager of H Brand's Guangdong region, I held 7 roadshow events in Shenzhen in one month. Each roadshow started at 16:00 and ended at 21:30, at leisure squares in suburban areas. The activity offered 5 ring-toss opportunities for 10 yuan for 3 bottles of beverage. The maximum sales in one night reached 6,700 yuan.

The second is the habitual purchase stage. In this stage, what we need to solve is the next topic, which is buying more.

Buying More

In this stage, consumers will actively go to sales points to buy our brand's beverages, and they have habitual consumption of our brand. However, to increase sales, we need to solve the problem of consumers buying more. We generally use instant special prices in supermarkets and bundle discounts at terminals to encourage consumers to buy more.

When I worked at Prince Milk in 2005, I discovered that the secret to Prince Milk's national sales of 2 billion yuan for a white bottle was whole-box purchases. Therefore, in this stage, I suggest that brands or regions focus on whole-box purchases. Currently, dairy companies like Yili and Mengniu have entered the 50 billion club. Do we see them selling single-box products? Almost all are whole-box purchases. Whole-box beverage purchases will also become a trend, especially in community stores.

Regarding the improvement of sales in county-level markets, I have briefly discussed these 5 aspects. I hope they are useful to everyone.

Hu Wei, pen name Jing Bozi, from Jiujiang, currently living in Beijing, graduated from Nanjing University of Finance and Economics, a practical marketing expert in FMCG, partner and chief marketing consultant of Shanghai Lixi Culture Communication Co., Ltd. He is a contributing writer for well-known domestic marketing magazines such as "Sales and Marketing", "China Wine News", and "Pharmaceutical Economics News". He is good at using Taoist Huang-Lao thought to create the "Six Hearts" management theory to build core sales teams. He focuses on differentiated marketing, channel incentives, and regional market breakthroughs for food and beverages. He has held positions such as Product Director and General Manager of Guangdong Region at Huiyuan Juice Group, Marketing Director and Marketing Director of Northern Region at Hunan Prince Milk Group, Marketing General Manager at Jiangxi Gaozheng Group, and Deputy Marketing General Manager at Duoduo Runer Company.

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