---
title: "Stabilize the 2023 Foundation: A Practical Guide for Distributors After the New Year"
description: "After the Lantern Festival, distributor teams should refocus and avoid falling back into old habits. This article provides practical steps for stabilizing this year's business foundation, including strengthening relationships with key customers, reviewing sales data, and coordinating with brand personnel on cooperation formats for key outlets."
author: "高级研究员 海游"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2023-02-06"
language: "en"
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# Stabilize the 2023 Foundation: A Practical Guide for Distributors After the New Year

> After the Lantern Festival, distributor teams should refocus and avoid falling back into old habits. This article provides practical steps for stabilizing this year's business foundation, including strengthening relationships with key customers, reviewing sales data, and coordinating with brand personnel on cooperation formats for key outlets.

**Introduction: Distributor teams should refocus, avoid falling back into old habits, and stabilize this year's business foundation!**

After the Lantern Festival, the Chinese New Year is essentially over, and distributor teams should get back to work. However, many distributors are prone to the mistake of operating on autopilot, lacking necessary reflection, forgetting pre-holiday plans, or discovering that the timing for implementing those plans is not yet ripe, forcing them to revert to old ways. Let's sort out what distributors should do at this stage and how to create the basic conditions for implementing last year's plans.

**Key Customer Review**

**Focus on Deepening Customer Relationships**

The FMCG industry has advocated for direct control of terminals for many years. Although leading brands have imposed strict constraints on the quantity and quality of wholesalers, the 80/20 principle still applies—80% of sales come from 20% of outlets (for leading brands, these 20% of outlets include a higher proportion of terminal stores). Therefore, distributor owners or key managers should personally visit these customers at the start of the year, and if possible, bring gifts. What should you do during these visits? Here are three suggestions:

1. **Chat about daily life and strengthen bonds.** If possible, sharing a meal or a drink is ideal. In Chinese business culture, personal relationships still carry significant weight. The best way to build rapport is to make customers feel valued; the best way to make them feel valued is to visit and chat during major holidays.

2. **Review data and compare actual sales over the past two years.** After the pleasantries, it's time to talk business. Tell customers their sales figures for 2021 and 2022. If sales have declined, ask what support they need. If sales have increased, inform them which products and channels still have room for growth and profit.

3. **Discuss this year's plans and favorable policies.** Confidence is contagious. First, distributors should convey a sense of certainty to downstream customers, boosting their morale. Then, promptly communicate the brand's favorable policies to customers, ensuring their loyalty. Finally, set both target and stretch goals to give customers direction. Of course, customers are not subordinates, so use incentives like rewards for achieving targets.

**Coordinate with Brand Personnel to Develop Cooperation Formats for Key Outlets**

Here, we need to answer two questions:

**First, why coordinate with brand personnel?** The purpose is to let brand leaders know that you are a thoughtful distributor who is making efforts, actively seeking solutions, and maintaining a positive attitude toward the market. You also need guidance from the brand and hope for market support.

**Second, why develop cooperation formats for key outlets?** Brand expenses are often budget-based—first budget planning, then implementation, followed by verification, reimbursement, and accounting. This often lacks flexibility. Therefore, it's essential to determine the cooperation format (e.g., exclusive store, display store, image store, rebate store) with the brand in advance, allowing brand personnel to plan and adjust budgets with a clear framework.

The cooperation format for key outlets is the guarantee of the market foundation, and agreements should be signed with downstream customers. Here are two examples:

For beverages, June to August is the peak sales season, and freezers are a battleground. If you wait until June 1st to sign a freezer display agreement, it will be too late. Many companies sign annual displays in the south; with limited resources, the latest you should sign is the end of April, otherwise, you'll have to rely on sales reps' personal connections during the peak season.

For campus channels, if school starts on September 1st, waiting until then to sign an exclusive or special display agreement will also be too late. The likelihood of getting an exclusive is low, and the display position will likely be poor, as proactive distributors start contacting relevant personnel as early as early August.

Therefore, confirm the cooperation format for key outlets with brand personnel as early as possible, including the supported budget range, the form of cooperation, and the time frame. Ensure that agreement signing progresses within the first month after work resumes. If these tasks are not done well, stabilizing this year's business foundation will be difficult.

**About the Author:** Hai You: Special contributor to New Distribution, Senior Researcher, Practitioner in offline channel marketing, and designer of enterprise channel coverage models. He has provided channel consulting for over ten leading brands, earning a good reputation.

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