---
title: "Personnel Management: The Core Issue Restricting Distributor Development"
description: "This article discusses the main problems in personnel management among FMCG distributors, including lack of effective time management, workflow management, financial audit management, and communication with sales staff, leading to high turnover and inefficiency. It proposes solutions such as enhancing work enthusiasm, implementing market management measures, changing management concepts, and building corporate brand to attract talent."
author: "李刚国"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2014-12-14"
language: "en"
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# Personnel Management: The Core Issue Restricting Distributor Development

> This article discusses the main problems in personnel management among FMCG distributors, including lack of effective time management, workflow management, financial audit management, and communication with sales staff, leading to high turnover and inefficiency. It proposes solutions such as enhancing work enthusiasm, implementing market management measures, changing management concepts, and building corporate brand to attract talent.

Friendly reminder: Click the blue text above "FMCG Distributor Professional Consulting" to learn more about marketing and distributor internal management.

During communication with distributors and daily market visits, it has been found that the current personnel management issues among distributors mainly include the following:

1. **Lack of effective time management for sales staff.** Distributors generally adopt a fatigue strategy in managing sales personnel, with only about 2 days of rest per week or even less. The so-called "working hours" far exceed 8 hours, typically from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, and some even start at 7:30 AM with no fixed end time. However, the efficiency of time usage is very low. Sales staff generally arrange their daily work based on their sales volume, task completion, and personal mood. After reporting in the morning, route salespeople disappear, and in the afternoon they casually fabricate a day's visit process to "report completion." Delivery personnel, after achieving their set goals, park the car in a corner and leave, or even drive around aimlessly. If they fail to meet sales targets, they wander the market without purpose, killing time until dark—the only reason being to "report completion" to the company.

2. **Lack of effective workflow management for sales staff.** Due to the lack of customer visit process management, the customer visit cycle for sales staff is increasingly shortened, while visit efficiency and sales performance decline, resulting in significant customer loss. Meanwhile, logistics and distribution costs continue to rise. Lack of goods allocation management leads to terminal stockouts of single products or even more severe shortages within a 3-5 day delivery cycle.

3. **Lack of effective financial audit management for sales staff.** The absence of effective financial audit management leads to increasingly concentrated terminal issues, severe losses in accounts receivable, increasing returns and exchanges, accumulation of old products, and weak promotion of new products. Costs continue to rise while profitability declines.

4. **Lack of daily sales follow-up management for sales staff.** Management of sales staff only has targets without follow-up, only systems without supervision and constraint, only result management without process management. At the beginning of the month, systems and indicators are set; at the end of the month, there is scolding and unfounded punishment.

5. **High turnover and recruitment difficulties** directly lead to continuously rising operational management costs and declining work efficiency. Disorderly management and unreasonable rewards and punishments directly cause imbalance in sales staff's mentality, increased complaints, and ultimately job changes.

6. **Lack of effective communication management with sales staff.** Distributors' companies are not large, but the bosses often have a big air, lacking daily communication and exchange with sales staff, directly leading to poor centripetal force, cohesion, and loyalty.

7. ......

There are many problems and various phenomena, but in the final analysis, they indicate that current distributors have certain management misunderstandings in business management (for example, equating working hours with work performance, reducing staff wages with reducing market expenses, and equating turnover with corporate profitability), and lack necessary management tools.

Based on years of business management experience and summaries of excellent distributors' management practices, the author believes that the ways to solve the above problems mainly include the following:

1. **Enhance the work enthusiasm of sales staff.** The sales work environment is relatively loose and relaxed, making management difficult, and many aspects rely mainly on the self-discipline and initiative of sales staff. As Yu Lei and Chen Ning mentioned in their co-authored book "Marketing in the Worst Situation," "A team without sales passion is as terrible as a team without the desire to score goals." From this, we can imagine how important it is to improve the work enthusiasm of sales staff. Distributors can achieve this through regular team meals, effective sales incentives, individual sales communication, and encouragement.

2. **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 capabilities and effectiveness.

3. **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-item measurement.

4. **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 manufacturer personnel is higher than that of distributor personnel, which is the same principle.

It can be seen that there are always more solutions than problems. Distributors need to continuously learn and improve, and make continuous improvements to their internal management systems to adapt to the current market conditions, in order to solve the core issue of "personnel management" and break through development bottlenecks to achieve sustained growth.

**Zhao Bo's PS:**
1. Sales targets should be set reasonably;
2. Team management should be fair;
3. Average wages should be higher than the local average;
4. Differentiate team sales income;
5. Establish an internal competition mechanism;

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Contact: zhaobo258@gmail.com · +86 158 5481 7671