---
title: "Six Principles for Boosting Natural Sales"
description: "Increasing natural sales is challenging in a competitive buyer's market where consumers are rational and rivals use aggressive marketing. This article outlines six principles—product strength, sales push, channel competitiveness, effective marketing carryover, seeking competitor pressure, and brand support—to help companies achieve higher natural sales without heavy advertising."
author: "李政权"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2015-06-22"
language: "en"
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# Six Principles for Boosting Natural Sales

> Increasing natural sales is challenging in a competitive buyer's market where consumers are rational and rivals use aggressive marketing. This article outlines six principles—product strength, sales push, channel competitiveness, effective marketing carryover, seeking competitor pressure, and brand support—to help companies achieve higher natural sales without heavy advertising.

“Increasing natural sales”—just these six words convey the difficulty of achieving it. After all, we are in a highly competitive buyer's market. In such a market, consumers are becoming more rational and mature; competitors, always eager to devour us, are bombarding and seizing precious consumer resources with advertising, promotions, and other marketing tactics. If we are truly stingy in marketing, how can our customers get to know and contact us? In this market environment, talking about achieving sales targets and increasing natural sales is indeed difficult! I believe every company that competes has pondered this issue. But thinking is one thing; whether other companies dare to do it is another, except for those lacking funds and forced to be passive. Because in the current market and competitive landscape, for many companies, investing heavily in advertising and promotions to conquer markets is the way to win customers and achieve profitability; hiding behind competition to stabilize and increase natural sales becomes a risk. In the mid-1990s, Jianlibao took such a risk one year. At year-end, Jianlibao paid a heavy price—sales fell nearly 50% compared to the previous year. If even Jianlibao, a pillar of China's beverage industry with strong brand value and recognition, suffered such a fate, would you dare to do it? Indeed, after that year, Jianlibao, despite financial constraints, never dared to shelve marketing tools like advertising and promotions. Nevertheless, Jianlibao continued to decline and was "remarried" to Zhejiang Guotou earlier this year. Of course, that's a digression.
Regardless, due to the nature of enterprises pursuing maximum profit, regardless of size, they must have pondered day and night how to increase natural sales. But is achieving natural sales targets and increasing natural sales really that difficult? How can we achieve the goal of increasing natural sales? Are there basic principles to follow? I hope this article can bring some inspiration and help to troubled companies.
1. Product Strength Pull
For most companies, they develop products based on major consumer demand trends and available raw materials; package and decorate products based on their own preferences, store appeal, and possible consumer likes and dislikes; price based on main competitors' prices and consumers' psychological acceptance; and communicate product claims based on raw materials, processes, and quality. The completeness of the process and the meticulousness of thinking seem flawless. But why is it hard for packaging and decoration to attract consumer attention and occasional purchases? Why can't product quality explanations and experiences attract long-term and loyal consumption? Why do consumers prefer higher-priced products over yours? Because strong product strength is not only about process completeness but also about details; not only about meticulous thinking but also about implementation and execution.
HL Company's new wedding candies, with their peanut-shaped, ingot-shaped, and embroidered ball packaging in bright red, were loved by all from the moment they were designed, and the market seemed promising. Indeed, after launch, the novel packaging attracted many eyes, and even though the candies were mainly targeted at the wedding market, a large portion ended up in the hands of children as toys. But after two or three months, once the novelty wore off, sales plummeted. Regarding product strength itself, there are three main reasons: First, they emphasized marginal products like packaging over the core product. The company's wedding candies, though OEM-produced by a famous domestic candy factory, used lower-quality candies with poor taste to save costs. Here, selling the product became mainly selling the marginal product. Obviously, when consumers attracted by packaging try the product and find it's "golden on the outside, rotten inside," it cannot earn a good reputation or stably expand the market. Second, novel and exquisite packaging can attract many consumers to try, but it is limited by novelty. Once it becomes familiar and "common," it suffers the same neglect as other familiar products. Without strong marketing support like product promotions and brand building, the path of novel packaging will require rapid updates and frequent changes. In such cases, only by continuously launching new packaging can you retain target consumers' attention and stimulate consumption. Third, for wedding candies that mainly sell packaging, the entry barrier is extremely low. Once competitors understand the strategy of using packaging to capture the market, they can easily follow suit or even do it better, and the market you expected becomes picked up by competitors and their rivals.
2. Sales Push Stimulation
Nowadays, few people talk about selling because the concept of "marketing" has almost dominated market operations. Perhaps it is this low recognition and neglect in terminology that has led to "short boards" and weak foundations in basic marketing operations related to selling. In fact, selling is a very basic link in marketing, as closely related as a building to its foundation.
In the traditional concept, selling seemed to include only the "door-knocking" behavior of salespeople carrying materials and samples. If we still understand selling this way today, there are many significant problems. For example, emphasizing the distributor (including terminal) link while neglecting the interactive communication with consumers emphasized in modern marketing. This overly self-conscious "boasting" behavior will ultimately have a very adverse effect on the smooth flow of logistics and capital chains. Obviously, when talking about selling now, we should also include face-to-face selling by sales guides or direct sales personnel at terminal stores, which is an extremely important link. In fact, research has shown that sales personnel recommendations account for about 30% of the factors in closing sales for products requiring personnel recommendation. But, as mentioned earlier, many companies have not truly recognized and valued this, including Naobaijin, which created a marketing miracle in China's health products industry.
In Naobaijin's base—Shanghai—many terminal sales guides actually regarded Naobaijin as a brain supplement. Imagine, if sales guides who directly face consumers don't know a product's nature or function, how can they effectively communicate to customers to benefit sales? In fact, not only that, many of Naobaijin's competitors, who enjoy the benefits of its massive advertising at the terminal, use the saved marketing expenses as terminal rebates to get sales guides to recommend their products first or prominently. This is a hidden danger in Naobaijin's terminal sales push, and also a common problem faced by many companies.
In fact, some thoughtful companies have recognized this from the start, especially high-end liquor and real estate products. Looking at their actions, there are three key points: First, they conduct rotating training for sales guides on product knowledge, company information, competitor information, sales pitches, and recommendation techniques, enabling them to handle any sales challenge. Second, based on competitor dynamics and market conditions, they adopt dynamic incentives such as box-opening and bottle-cap prizes, cumulative sales awards, social gatherings, year-end cash, material rewards, and incentive travel, effectively controlling sales guides to ensure terminal presence leads to terminal consumers. Third, they focus on market trends and competitive changes, and strengthen supervision. If the upstream manufacturer to midstream and downstream merchants, and from manufacturer to terminal face-to-face selling are all done well, the product flow will be smoother.
3. Building Channel Competitiveness
For channels, two aspects greatly affect natural sales. First, network competitiveness: distribution and shelf presence rate; second, terminal competitiveness: quality of in-store display and sales.
Regarding distribution and shelf presence rate, it means ensuring your product is available in a certain number of outlets in each sub-segment of the target regional market, with the optimal ratio referencing the golden ratio 0.618 for distribution. This can basically achieve the effect of having your product on shelves in all outlets in the target market. Simply put, it's about making it convenient for target consumers to see and buy your product "anytime, anywhere." Otherwise, products that do poorly in this area will suffer severe sales losses.
YT Company is a company I personally conducted marketing diagnosis and transformation for. The company mainly produces and sells snacks like French fries and potato chips. At one point, its Kunming market sales suddenly dropped from an average of over 700,000 yuan per month to about 400,000 yuan. What caused YT's sales to suffer such a "Waterloo"? After research, the main reasons were found. Due to insufficient incentives for sales personnel and weak supervision, sales staff became demoralized, lazy, and idle, not developing new outlets, not proactively visiting old ones, and not delivering goods promptly. This ultimately caused the claimed over 70% distribution rate to drop to about 30%, and the so-called 36% market share fell to 18%. YT was unaware of these issues. The huge fluctuation in sales was understandable. Not only in Kunming, but also in Chengdu, due to the local agent's lack of recognition of YT's brand, distribution and promotion were not active, creating a bottleneck for natural sales. Despite multiple advertising and promotional stimuli, the sales bottleneck could not be broken due to distribution limitations, and eventually they had to withdraw from the Chengdu market.
Regarding the quality of in-store display and sales, it mainly refers to how well a company and its products are displayed and managed in terminal stores. In fact, besides distribution, another main reason for YT's sales "Waterloo" was the inadequacy of its in-store display quality. The market diagnosis found that products either had poor shelf positions or were blocked by competitors' products, hidden behind or underneath. It's easy to imagine that such display quality, which fails to enter target consumers' view and contact, would greatly affect a product's natural sales. In contrast, QY Liquor Company, which produces plum wine, had a different situation. Every time their plum wine was placed on shelves, they would deliberately remove a few bottles to give consumers a feeling of "hot sales" and stimulate follow-up consumption. Because of these details in building channel competitiveness, QY's plum wine could maintain annual sales of around 5 million yuan in Kunming with almost no advertising or promotional investment.
I believe there are many companies with the same problems as YT. The reasons may include weak incentives and supervision for sales personnel, improper selection and supervision of distributors, or insufficient awareness or business quality of market managers. But regardless of the cause, if these issues are not addressed promptly, more companies will fail. For practical methods of building channel competitiveness, readers may refer to my articles "Do Transformation, Not Advertising—A Case Study of X Enterprise's Snack Food Marketing Diagnosis" and "Strive to Build Terminal Sales Guide Competitiveness."
4. Accumulation and Continuation of Effective Marketing Promotion Effects
The accumulation and continuation of effective marketing promotion effects can still have a significant impact on natural sales during periods without advertising or promotions. Perhaps the cases of Haiwang Jinzun and Naobaijin can help illustrate this.
Haiwang Jinzun, a regular functional food, used the slogan "To work, you need a healthy liver" (要干更要肝), misleading consumers into thinking it was a functional health food or even medicine that could both relieve alcohol and protect the liver and lower enzymes. This exaggerated misleading clearly violated national advertising laws, consumer rights laws, and other regulations. This led to the banning of Haiwang Jinzun's advertisements and even sales bans in some regional markets. However, these did not prevent Haiwang Jinzun from maintaining relatively high natural sales in most regional markets. Many of my friends still insist on taking Haiwang Jinzun half an hour before social engagements. Analyzing Haiwang Jinzun's marketing case, it's easy to see that because it refined and integrated its selling points of alcohol relief and liver protection into the consumer buying point "To work, you need a healthy liver"; because of the real support of its relatively significant alcohol-relief efficacy; and because of its exaggerated misleading, Haiwang Jinzun quickly gained a large base of loyal consumers, allowing it to maintain high natural sales even after advertising and promotions stopped.
In marketing cases adhering to the principle of effect priority, Naobaijin is a highly controversial product. But whether its gift concept became one of China's most disliked advertisements and how "disgusting" and "nauseating" it was, its advertising sales power is envied by many companies. After all, it deeply planted the gift concept in consumers' minds and created a miracle in China's health products industry with annual sales exceeding 1 billion yuan. However, on closer inspection, its massive advertising investment might have been more promotional than the ads themselves. But Shi Yuzhu's Naobaijin may have been too afraid of failure and ignored the existence of natural sales, so even in recent years when the gift concept was deeply rooted, it continued heavy investment without pause. In fact, Naobaijin's advertising could have rested for a while because its marketing after a phase could stimulate a certain period of high natural sales. Naobaijin's gift concept and its marketing's inability to advance or retreat, like "a big ship is hard to turn," also caused Naobaijin to face difficulty and pain in truly transitioning to "youthful, healthy products" (perhaps more appropriately called returning to functional claims).
5. Seeking Competitor Pressure
"Seeking competitor pressure"? Isn't this the opposite extreme of "innovation is death"? Isn't this encouraging us to enter markets with many competitors and seek our own doom? In fact, it's not. In the high-end communications market, Iridium had no competitors, but after operating for a short time, it couldn't bear the burden of no competition and eventually declared bankruptcy, becoming a "shooting star." Why "couldn't bear the burden of no competitors"? Because in a specific market segment, if there are few or no competitors, it likely means there is no real demand in the consumer market. Conversely, seeking competitor pressure and entering a market with many competitors means the demand is relatively real and huge. In such a market, an enterprising company that can turn pressure into motivation and use clever tactics is likely to achieve greater success in natural sales due to the pressure and squeeze from competitors.
Seeking competitor pressure may echo the old saying "the best defense is a good offense," making companies that follow this principle more likely to win in the market and rise in status. However, in this process, it's especially important to be both wise and brave: able to "conquer the world" and also "govern the world."
6. Brand Support
A few years ago, a survey showed that consumers' brand designation purchase rate had reached over 18%. That is, if we take P&G's Rejoice shampoo as an example, out of 100 consumers, more than 18 would specifically ask for Rejoice. It's clear that any brand has a group of loyal supporters and followers. This shows the power of brands. No wonder some say we have entered an era of brand marketing.
But whether we have truly entered the era of brand marketing or how deeply the brand concept has penetrated, brand building has fallen into many misconceptions that must be discussed. First, brands are considered to be created by huge advertising investments. Obviously, this overlooks an extremely important factor: brand characteristics are not just awareness, but more importantly, reputation. Only with sufficient reputation can a brand persistently gain consumer favor and trust, and achieve the maximum number of customers. What is reputation? Reputation is the ability to follow and guide consumer needs through R&D, packaging, guaranteed product quality, and timely and thoughtful service. Simply put, it's the ability to meet or better meet customer needs that competitors cannot or cannot well meet. Second, some think the brand is their "son," raised with hard work. This view directly leads to brands that emphasize recognition and communication but ignore consumer intentions, becoming products of "arbitrary behavior" from the company's own perspective. The true creators of brands are the vast number of consumers and their actual consumption. What really drives the largest number of consumers to actually buy? Of course, it's the company's attitude as a "nanny" raising a "son" for consumers, establishing a solid relationship of intimacy and trust, and letting consumers treat the product as their "son." Third, some think that once they have a brand with certain sales power, they can rest on their laurels and sit back, without maintaining the brand or promoting its dynamic development. This clearly underestimates the progress of consumer psychology and knowledge, as well as the ability of competing brands and oneself to educate the consumer market.
These misconceptions in brand building and marketing are not limited to a small scope, nor do they differ much between big and small brands. For example, Qinchi, the "bid king," had high awareness, but due to low reputation and weak brand, it couldn't recoup its advertising investments and "drowned" itself in its own water; or Xiangwushi, a once-popular "foreign product," a fabricated international brand from Denmark, fell due to lack of integrity; or Qingdao Beer's brand marketing mistake in the Yunnan-Guizhou market, where the production date was later than the prize deadline, pushing it into a trap of negative media and competitor attacks. It's clear that a brand that truly has sales power and can promote and increase natural sales is high-quality products and services, and integrity. Remember, the brand is just a "son" you "feed" for consumers; you are just a brand nanny who earns money by "feeding" the brand.
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