Just finished a client meeting where clients had many complaints: business is getting harder, profits are shrinking, personnel management is more demanding, and recruitment is more difficult. Overall, the issues mainly focus on "scale and profitability" and "personnel recruitment and management," ultimately boiling down to how to manage personnel. Currently, personnel management has become the core issue restricting distributor development.
Through my communication with distributors and daily market visits, I've found that current personnel management in distribution mainly has the following problems:
Lack of effective time management for sales staff. Distributors commonly adopt a fatigue strategy in managing sales staff, with only about 2 days off per week or even less. The so-called "working hours" far exceed 8 hours, typically from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, with some starting as early as 7:30 AM and no fixed end time. However, the efficiency of time usage is very low. Sales staff generally arrange their daily work based on their daily sales, task completion, and personal mood. Route salespeople disappear after morning check-in and casually fabricate a visit schedule in the afternoon to "report" their work. Delivery staff, after achieving their set goals, park the vehicle in a corner and disappear, or even drive around aimlessly. If they fail to meet sales targets, they wander the market aimlessly, killing time until dark, just to "report" to the company.
Lack of effective workflow management for sales staff. Due to the lack of customer visit process management, the visit cycle for sales staff is shortening, while visit efficiency and sales performance decline, causing significant customer loss. Meanwhile, logistics and delivery costs continue to rise. Lack of order management for delivery staff leads to stockouts of single products or even more severe shortages within a 3-5 day delivery cycle.
Lack of effective financial audit management for sales staff. Without proper financial audit management, terminal issues accumulate, accounts receivable losses are severe, returns and exchanges increase, old products pile up, and new product promotion weakens. Costs keep rising while profitability declines.
Lack of daily sales follow-up management for sales staff. Management only has targets without follow-up, only systems without supervision and constraints, only result management without process management. At the beginning of the month, systems and indicators are set; at the end, there is scolding and unfounded punishment.
High staff turnover and recruitment difficulties directly lead to rising operational management costs and declining work efficiency. Management disorder and unreasonable rewards and punishments directly cause imbalance in sales staff's mentality, increased complaints, and eventually job changes.
Lack of effective communication management with sales staff. Distributors' companies are not large, but the bosses often have a big ego, lacking daily communication with sales staff, directly leading to poor cohesion, low loyalty, and weak sense of belonging.
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There are many problems and various phenomena, but ultimately they indicate that current distributors have certain management misconceptions in business management (e.g., equating longer working hours with more sales, reducing wages as a way to cut market costs, equating sales volume with profitability) and lack necessary management tools.
Based on my years of business management experience and summaries of excellent distributors' management practices, the solutions to the above problems mainly include the following:
Enhance sales staff's work passion. The sales environment is relatively loose and unstructured, making management difficult, and many aspects rely on the self-discipline and initiative of sales staff. As Yu Lei and Chen Ning mentioned in their book "Marketing in the Worst Situation," "A team without sales passion is as terrible as a team without the desire to score." Thus, it's crucial to boost sales staff's enthusiasm. Distributors can achieve this through regular team meals, effective sales incentives, individual sales communication, and encouragement.
Adopt necessary market management measures. For example, daily sales report management, meeting management, financial audits, and irregular market visits to identify deficiencies in business management and follow up on daily sales management, thereby improving business management capability and effectiveness.
Change management concepts. Measure the feasibility of business management methods by results, focusing on effectiveness rather than form, and on input-output rather than single metrics.
Build corporate brand. Use the corporate brand to attract and retain talent. Currently, with the same salary expenditure, recruiting under a well-known company's name is much easier than under an agent's name. The stability of staff in manufacturers is higher than in agents, for this reason.
Thus, there are always more solutions than problems. Distributors need to continuously learn and improve, and adapt their management systems to the current market conditions to solve the core issue of "personnel management" and break through development bottlenecks for sustained growth.
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