---
title: "Organizational Mindset for Frontline City Managers to Drive New Retail Implementation"
description: "Many frontline city managers struggle to advance new retail due to pressure from core offline business targets. The key is a three-step approach: first upgrade organizational structure, then execute new retail, and finally achieve breakthroughs. This article focuses on the organizational mindset needed to stabilize core business and free up time for new retail."
author: "许翔 Ryan Xu"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2022-08-18"
language: "en"
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# Organizational Mindset for Frontline City Managers to Drive New Retail Implementation

> Many frontline city managers struggle to advance new retail due to pressure from core offline business targets. The key is a three-step approach: first upgrade organizational structure, then execute new retail, and finally achieve breakthroughs. This article focuses on the organizational mindset needed to stabilize core business and free up time for new retail.

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For a long time, many frontline city managers have been puzzled by a question: "I really want to do well in new retail, but the pressure of offline core business performance targets is too great. Often, when promoting new retail, I feel powerless. Every month, I start with high ambitions at the beginning, but at the end, I find myself stuck in the same place!"
**On the basis of ensuring the core existing business, how can we effectively promote new retail business?**
The answer is a three-step approach! Each city manager must **first upgrade the organizational structure, then execute new retail, and finally achieve substantial breakthroughs in new retail.**
Compared with organizational structure upgrade, the latter two steps already have many mature methodologies and practical case libraries. The first step is easy to become superficial, requiring a mindset to make this task concrete.
**Mindset is essentially a mental map that makes things actually happen. As a city manager or office director, you need to formulate an organizational upgrade mindset based on your team's characteristics and customer business background.**
First, you need to identify the most critical positions. Which key positions cannot be missing, without which your business performance would fail?
In most cases, the following three roles are indispensable:
First, salespeople with core channel relationships, who basically ensure the stability of primary business; second, promotion supervisors for key channels such as hypermarkets, who ensure the stability of secondary sales; third, the distributor's supply chain and finance support departments, who ensure the stability of the business chain.
Because they ensure the stability of the core business, only when the core business is stable can you truly release your time and energy to do new retail. Otherwise, it is just empty talk.
**Core business is the city's first growth curve, stability is paramount, gradually delegate and fully authorize!**
**New retail promotion is the second growth curve, development is the priority, lead personally and implement with knowledge and action!**
To conquer the outside, you must first stabilize the inside. The premise of trying and exploring new retail channels is to **stabilize the core foundation!**
It is recommended that each city manager first check the qualification and combat effectiveness of the most important core positions in their core business.
Except for some important decisions that need to be reported to you as the city manager, most daily matters of the core business can be solved autonomously by them. This is not only trust in the team but also a strategic reallocation of energy.
Because from my extensive visits and observations on the frontline, the "top leader" of a grassroots city sales organization (city manager or office director) currently needs to do more to find incremental directions for the team, promote the new retail channel as the "second growth curve" in terms of direction setting, strategy exploration, execution, and result delivery.
If you, as before, still over-focus on the details and process control of the core business, you will easily lose attention, understanding, and breakthroughs in new retail.
Frontline city managers must think about the second curve, specifically the breakthrough in new retail channels. The starting point for balancing is to let the original core people handle the core business, while you lead new people to do new retail and new channels, achieving new growth.
△The latest practical book by the author Xu Xiang: "FMCG Regional/City Manager Omnichannel Management"
At this point, some may ask, "Why not let the original core talents do new retail? Why must the city manager lead personally?"
There are four main reasons:
1. The proficiency and deep understanding of traditional channel core business often hinder learning new retail. Path dependence causes many excellent core old employees to have already achieved cognitive closure.
2. The platform buyers and sellers that new retail connects with are often young, requiring our younger people to match their pace of staying up late and simple, direct communication. Old salespeople who can win in traditional channels often do not adapt.
3. Since the entire operational chain of new retail is very different from core traditional channels, if a city manager cannot thoroughly grasp and understand it, it is easy to fall into superficial "ineffective management."
4. Facing new retail, a high-difficulty action and new cognitive channel, the "main general" of the city market must personally step up, show the team, show subordinates, and show distributors! Only by personally engaging can you truly drive the team and distributors to accept and invest in new retail channels.
Of course, many daily specific coordination, execution, and operation matters do not require the city manager's full energy and time, but you must understand the key actions and resource bottlenecks in the entire chain of each new retail channel's business operation!
It is recommended to use weekend time to intensively absorb and input, using quality questioning techniques to guide new retail salespeople to directly input to you in a condensed way, and then you judge the granularity and priority of details for each action. So under normal circumstances, the salesperson responsible for new retail channels will definitely understand deeper than you, but that does not hinder your overall understanding and judgment.
Therefore, the success or failure of new retail channel breakthroughs often depends on whether the city manager leads personally! In the early stage of developing new retail in each city, please put aside the management mindset and engage personally as a salesperson.
**Because only after personal engagement will you discover that the new retail channel is a process of continuous grinding. Without more resources to practice, try, and operate, it is difficult to have substantial experience output.**
**When connecting with any new channel initially, do not be afraid of trouble, losing money, or being questioned. Without early experience summary, there will be no later platform breakthroughs and performance upgrades.**
Of course, reducing the cost of trial and error is always something every city manager needs to consider. The recommended approach is to decompose each connection process node and operational action, and conduct timely reviews, summaries, and conclusions of phased results.
You need to tolerate subordinates and distributors investing resources in a pit or poster that may not yield results, but you must produce a review for each attempt, that is, the reasons for failure and the subsequent optimization path and action breakdown. If these are done, you should also actively recognize and encourage.
Subsequently, continuously summarize these reviews and thoughts, gradually polish out complete standard operating procedures and norms, and use them to train new colleagues and distributors, thereby continuously iterating everyone's cognition, resonating at the same frequency, and jointly improving the operational cognition and quality of new retail channels.
The success or failure of each brand's new retail business depends on whether it can efficiently and systematically empower frontline grassroots operational teams. The best grassroots sales organization management has no redundant actions. All frontline city managers must lead by example and engage personally.
**【Guo Zhihai, Head of Sales, Greater China, Mondelez】Salute to channel partners, meet in Chengdu, August 31 - September 2, 2022 (7th) China FMCG Channel Innovation Conference.**
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