---
title: "Salespeople: \"Free-range\" or \"Caged\"?"
description: "Most domestic companies adopt a \"free-range\" approach to managing their salespeople, dispersing them across markets with each responsible for a territory. This leads to confusion about the value of salespeople, inefficiency, and frustration for both management and the salespeople themselves. The solution lies in a \"three-level classification principle\" that divides salespeople into service, management, and innovation roles, and organizing them into specialized teams."
author: "New Distribution"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2015-11-28"
language: "en"
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# Salespeople: "Free-range" or "Caged"?

> Most domestic companies adopt a "free-range" approach to managing their salespeople, dispersing them across markets with each responsible for a territory. This leads to confusion about the value of salespeople, inefficiency, and frustration for both management and the salespeople themselves. The solution lies in a "three-level classification principle" that divides salespeople into service, management, and innovation roles, and organizing them into specialized teams.

Most domestic companies adopt a "free-range" approach to managing their salespeople, dispersing them across markets with each responsible for a territory. Whether large or small, barren or fertile, within their own patch, salespeople are expected to handle everything, acting as feudal lords. There are generally two forms:

Salespeople stationed in regional offices or branch offices jokingly refer to themselves as "completely free-range." They are only allowed to go home occasionally during the year. Apart from rare opportunities like vacations, debriefings, or headquarters meetings, they are essentially rooted in the local area. Some are even recruited one day and dispatched to the market the next. Sometimes it happens that no one in the company knows them except their direct supervisor, and they are not even allowed into headquarters.

Those who go down to "run the market" monthly are "partially free-range." At the beginning of the month, they set out from headquarters with plans and tasks, not returning until the end of the month, typically spending more than 20 days per month on business trips. In the market, thousands of salespeople toil and bustle in this way, and no one sees anything wrong with it. But just because something is customary does not mean it is correct. We should have deeper thoughts about the management of sales personnel.

**Corporate Confusion: What is the Value of Salespeople?**

A company president shared his confusion with the author. "The marketing director constantly asks me for more staff. Every time we finish talking about work, he brings it up. He always says competitors have hired more salespeople, pressuring the company to increase headcount. It's the same old story, and I'm tired of hearing it." "Even with the current few dozen people, I think it's too many. Salespeople in the market are either sleeping or sightseeing. Some regions have been without a salesperson for a long time, yet distributors still sell well. I don't think salespeople have as much value as they claim; we could do with fewer."

This sentiment is not an isolated case. Companies cannot do without salespeople in the market, but having too many seems wasteful. Each salesperson costs tens of thousands of yuan per year in expenses. If there are a hundred or so, nearly ten million in profits disappears, which truly pains the company. Most critically, the value of sales personnel is vague. "Free-range" salespeople in the field operate independently, out of the company's sight. What they do and how it directly helps performance is not well known to the company. Even if regional sales increase, it could be the result of multiple factors. From the company's perspective, macro factors like product, price, technical content, brand influence, and market investment seem to contribute more than the micro efforts of sales personnel.

**Management Confusion: Why Aren't Sales Increasing?**

With salespeople away for long periods, effective management becomes the biggest headache for marketing departments. They guard against salespeople more than thieves. Fearing they won't work, they require check-ins via landline. A salesperson must call headquarters from the distributor's local phone to prove their presence, lest they hide somewhere and enjoy leisure while falsely claiming travel expenses. Fearing they work but don't exert effort, they require market logs. Daily work must be written in detail for company inspection, lest they skim the surface and go through the motions. Fearing they exert effort but don't produce results, they create a series of evaluations and rewards. Every month, a pile of plans and forms are issued, with countless assessment indicators. But even so, sales growth remains unsatisfactory. What baffles management is that they have managed all the areas they should, and the team seems to be working hard, so why aren't the results ideal?

**Salespeople's Confusion: What Have We Really Learned?**

"After graduating and directly becoming a salesperson, the rest of my life is ruined." This is the lament of some veteran salespeople after many years. Spending a few years in the market, they pick up bad habits—eating, drinking, gambling, and worse—while learning little good. Young salespeople are blank slates; when faced with shrewd distributors and difficult customers, they may have to learn "bad" ways to get by. "Free-range" salespeople are mostly trained by "old hands," and apprentices imitate their masters. Although they may learn some market skills, their level never improves. Moreover, being confined to one region for a long time, they lack judgment about the national market and industry trends, and have little exposure to new knowledge and methods. They rely on the same old tricks, gradually becoming helpless in driving sales growth. Over the years, sales personnel become the "lost generation." They grope in the dark, troubled by what they can learn from work and where their future lies.

**The Harm of "Free-range": Confusion of Salesperson Value**

The root cause of these confusions is a lack of systematic understanding of the value of sales personnel. Their daily work may seem complex, but it actually falls into three categories:

· Primary value—"Service worker" role: Focus on service, including promoting the company's products and policies; reimbursing channel expenses for promotions, renovations, etc.; coordinating logistics and delivery; assisting after-sales service; and collecting market information.

· Intermediate value—"Administrator" role: Focus on management, including terminal recruitment and building the company's channel network; preventing cross-regional selling and enforcing company regulations; handling distributor disputes and boosting channel morale; supervising expense allocation and implementing company reward and punishment policies.

· Advanced value—"Coach" role: Focus on innovation and guidance, including innovation in promotional methods, channel construction approaches, and market management content.

In reality, these three types of work bring vastly different value to the company, with value increasing from the first to the third. However, when salespeople are "free-range," each has their own territory, from a small prefecture-level city to several provinces or a large region. No one can help them, so they often have to handle all three types of work. "Service, management, and guidance" are all indispensable, and they must manage every aspect of the channel, leading to a lack of focus and clear direction. They do what they're not good at, and have no time for what they excel at.

A sample survey shows that a regional manager, who should embody advanced value, often spends 60% of their time on basic service work, over 30% on daily management, and less than 10% on innovative market development.

More seriously, newcomers who don't yet understand the market jump into management before mastering service, causing chaos. Meanwhile, "old hands" who can only handle routine management but cannot innovate go to the market to give orders, acting as frontline coaches, leading to worse performance. Everyone is in a state of low or even negative output.

In traditional Chinese marketing management, companies lump these three types of work together and impose them on all salespeople without distinction. This "mixed use" of sales personnel leads to low market output efficiency. This "block-based" feudal model makes everyone an official but no one does well. The consequence of imposing all-encompassing responsibilities on salespeople is that companies, management, and salespeople all suffer from inefficiency.

**Efficient Use of Salespeople: The "Three-Level Classification Principle"**

Corresponding to the "block-based" organizational model is "line-based" management. Simply put, it means leveraging each salesperson's strengths to form specialized divisions and improve overall efficiency. Based on the value of sales personnel, they can be divided into three levels, and the "three-level classification principle" should be applied in their use.

· Junior salespeople—Ox type: Primarily engaged in service work, requiring low personal ability but a good work attitude. Those who excel in service are often diligent "old ox" types.

· Intermediate salespeople—Fish type: Primarily engaged in management work, requiring higher personal ability and experience. Those who excel in management have years of practical experience and strong coordination skills, moving through the market like a fish in water.

· Senior salespeople—Eagle type: Primarily engaged in innovation and guidance, requiring high personal ability and innovation capability. Those who excel in guidance have been tempered through the first two stages, able to draw inferences and handle both strategy and execution. They have keen eyes to spot problems and take action to solve them.

The purpose of using salespeople is to let eagles fly, not plow; let fish swim, not force them to fly; let oxen plow, and prevent them from swimming.

Specifically, establish "line-based" specialized management. Centralize work and make individuals experts in one area. This first requires breaking the old "block-based" regional model. "Block-based" is by region; "line-based" is by function. All sales personnel are used uniformly by the marketing department, no longer divided by region, but based on their strengths, forming "promotion teams," "management teams," "service teams," and "recruitment teams" as combat units.

The daily management of existing channels is mainly handled by the "management team" and "service team," while emerging channels or model markets are tackled by the "recruitment team" and "promotion team."

**-END-**

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