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Last night, Teacher Ma explained the "Customer Sorting Tool" for distributor customer management to netizens in our QQ group. Those in the group could see the training content. Considering that over 10,000 followers of our public account did not see it, today Daonong has transcribed the teacher's training content from the group into text and published it on the public account for everyone to learn together. Below this article is our QQ group number. We will regularly conduct training on distributor internal management in the group. If you are interested, you can join the group to exchange and learn.

The following is the training content:

Hello everyone! Welcome to Shangdao Enterprise Marketing Management Consulting.

Shangdao Enterprise Marketing Management Consulting targets FMCG distributors, with main service items:

Distributor management planning; budget management; organizational structure; process reengineering; financial sorting; operational database establishment; performance evaluation; team training, etc.

Shangdao Enterprise Marketing Management Consulting is willing to become a learning and exchange platform for FMCG distributors, willing to provide valuable sharing for FMCG distributors, and willing to be your advisor and good friend! In the previous class, we introduced the "Three Sorts" theory of simple management for FMCG distributors, and elaborated on its core "Customer Sorting," mainly explaining three issues:

  • After changes in the market environment, the customer classification management of "Customer Sorting" should keep pace with the times. We analyzed the new patterns after changes in the white liquor consumer market in 2013 and 2014, conducted new customer sorting, and summarized how to organize customer management and respond to market changes.
  • Clarified the responsibility definition of "Customer Sorting" work: department heads are the decision-makers for customer sorting, and salespeople are the first executors of customer sorting. This is a very important job responsibility definition, establishing a customer sorting operation system.
  • Distributors at different stages have different customer sorting practices. We introduced how distributors still in the start-up stage can implement the "Company Imprint Plan."

Today, we will discuss the second part of "Customer Sorting":

Specific Methods of Customer Sorting:

Finding customers is like finding a wife; if you don't find well, no matter how good you are to her, she will run away with someone else.

Our business personnel engaged in alcohol beverage channel marketing feel this most deeply. They often face terminal interception by competing brands. Yesterday everything was fine, but with a temptation from a competitor, the customer turns away. In competition, we repeatedly feel the coldness of the world, constantly verifying Churchill's famous quote in the Iron Curtain speech: Only eternal interests, no eternal friends. In fact, this is a complaint under passive customer management. If you adopt scientific customer sorting methods, research targeted customer management measures, and firmly grasp the issues customers care most about, customers will feel your value different from other salespeople, making those tempted customers hesitate and not easily turn away.

I. Problems to Solve in Distributor Customer Sorting:

  • Sorting customers means organizing customers: divide customers into different categories and adopt differentiated methods to achieve more effective performance expansion; (detailed later)
  • Sorting customers means organizing customers: dig out the main factors affecting customer sales, research targeted measures, and increase sales; (customer product sales flow analysis)
  • Understand customer sales structure thoroughly, firmly grasp and fill main-selling products, leaving no opportunity for competitors;
  • Sorting customers means organizing customers: find ways to help customers improve sales, help customers solve difficulties, and guide customers to turn their core customers into reliable partners;
  • Once customers are sorted well, your main work line becomes clearer, work levels are planned, making it easier to implement your work plan and making the plan more reliable. Preparation becomes more从容, thus improving work efficiency.

Current distributor management largely lacks a systematic set of tools to clearly understand the various links of enterprise operation. Customer management is the same. We hope distributor friends, through our customer sorting learning, can establish their own systematic customer sorting tools.

II. Conditions Required for Customer Sorting:

A distributor, facing the market to make decisions, managers must possess the following conditions:

  • Sufficient customer information data: Sufficient information can reflect external environmental changes, allowing managers to discover existing opportunities and hidden threats, thereby analyzing accurate results. Information flow represents management flow; if information is not smooth, decisions cannot be made. This information includes: customer performance ranking, customer sales structure analysis, typical customer surveys, same-period data comparison, input-output analysis, etc.
  • The more detailed your understanding of customers, the more accurate your judgment of customers. This is never wrong at any time!!!

Here is a story about big data: A high school daughter took her father to a supermarket. She chose her favorite luxurious shopping center. In the supermarket, a salesperson suddenly enthusiastically recommended baby products to her. Her father was very angry and went to the customer service desk to complain about the salesperson. The person in charge listened, then said politely, calmly, and thoughtfully: "Sir, please accept my suggestion. Go home and have a good communication with your daughter. Within two days, we will definitely give you a responsible reply." After going home, the father confirmed: his daughter was indeed pregnant.

This is a lesson taught by modern information means: modern shopping centers use multi-faceted data resources on ERP platforms for deep processing and value mining to provide necessary data analysis and support for enterprise management and decision-making, enabling data research on every customer's consumption behavior.

In fact, existing inventory and sales software, CRM, have powerful regional market analysis, product analysis, and customer analysis functions. Unfortunately, most distributors have not utilized them.

Therefore, distributor friends must be good at using new tools to improve management, such as: inventory, financial software, ERP, CRM, PDA, etc. Must pay attention to operational information, establish your own information data management system, and establish your own operational database. Distributors who have already equipped with inventory and sales software should not just treat it as a statistical tool for financial personnel; fully utilize its report analysis system to play a role in market analysis and customer analysis.

Distributors who have not yet used inventory and sales software, your current management is definitely not rational. In our view, a distributor with sales scale above ten million yuan, if not equipped with inventory and sales software, relying on primitive manual methods cannot obtain sufficient customer information. Then don't talk about business analysis management; you will miss many market opportunities because you lack sufficient information data, only living in your own feeling world, making it difficult to make objective judgments.

From this, everyone can see that if distributor management personnel still remain in a vague experiential management state, and are still very averse to software, forms, inspections, and processes, then they are really about to be isolated from the world. Be prepared to be eliminated.

Okay, let's return to our outline issue: Conditions required for customer sorting:

**- Sufficient customer information data;

  • Professional knowledge: need to be familiar with and master the professional knowledge system of the terminal market.
  • Experience and insight: such as market seasonal change patterns, product single-item growth cycles.**

If business is not specialized and information is not smooth, decisions made under such circumstances naturally are difficult to achieve expectations. For example: for a customer without sales potential, adopting the same strong promotional measures as a customer with great sales potential will certainly lose due benefits and make your plan fail.

The following discussion still uses white liquor distributors as an example for analysis:

III. Customer Sorting Based on Customer Characteristics:

Divide into different types according to the customer's own operating characteristics: group purchase customers, storefront customers, distribution customers three types.

  • Group purchase customers: Have good personal connections, mostly with social resource backgrounds, have more high-quality customer resources, excel in selling mid-to-high-end products, especially important for new product promotion and development, and core product promotion. They often have industry risk benchmark value and are very conducive to creating market atmosphere for target products. Such customers have very high profit expectations, are more suitable for differentiated policy investment, and are the focus of same-industry image display competition. Group purchase customers have special value during product promotion period. As products mature, encouraging group purchase customers to update and replace products accordingly, and planning product upgrade plans is a good solution.

  • Supermarket and hypermarket customers: Are a relatively special customer group. Their特殊性 lies in that supermarkets and hypermarkets are the mainstream channels of modern circulation industry, with high market share, high customer concentration, strong strength, high professionalism, and particularly large holiday sales. During holidays, displays such as堆头, end caps, promotional staff, and buy-give promotions are bustling, making them the best window for product publicity and price positioning. Supermarket and hypermarket customers have irreplaceable value for product market introduction and product momentum creation. Maintaining such customers requires familiarity with modern store processes and rules, and a good sense of leveraging opportunities; otherwise, it is easy to be calculated. Many distributors without supermarket operation experience often return in defeat.

  • Storefront customers: Represented by famous cigarette and liquor stores, comprehensive stores, convenience stores, with wide coverage and mostly rich industry experience, are the main component of the alcohol beverage market. (Due to time constraints, briefly mentioned here)

  • Distribution customers: Do not mainly rely on store sales, or even have no stores, formed by the退化 of traditional wholesale into door-to-door delivery vehicle sales. If controlled properly, they are a good supplement and echo to the main channel operation. During product promotion period, they play an effective auxiliary role in improving market maturity, product distribution rate, and sales in remote markets. However, distribution customers are also the most prone to price穿底 (price collapse). If not managed well, it is easy to cause the collapse of the price system. The best way to deal with this problem is to do a good job in managing the product flow direction of distribution customers, making distribution customers fearful. The biggest problem in managing distribution customers is: thinking that distribution customers are difficult to manage and thus giving up management. In fact, this type of customer management is not without methods; it depends on whether you are attentive. As long as you keep a close eye on management, although it cannot be cured, it can be controlled within a low limit. Another problem is that distribution customers are often the kings of channel diversion (窜货).

IV. How to Sort Out Key Customers:

Selection of key customers is based on data. Generally, according to the Pareto principle (80/20 rule), use inventory and sales software to query: annual customer performance ranking, customer profit contribution ranking, single product sales ranking. According to customer performance ranking, select the top 20% of total customers from high to low; additionally, add customers whose performance does not meet the standard but have significant industry influence or good customer relationships with us, to form key customers.

Key accounts should be managed with priority, spending more time, manpower, and resources on customer relationship management. These key customers have strong negotiation and bargaining power. The company must spend more effort on maintaining customer relationships. In work, one end is the company's interests, the other end is the customer's interests. This requires salespeople to have the ability to handle complex problems, strong interpersonal skills, and continuous innovation in customer management to maintain close cooperative relationships.

V. How to Sort Out Potential Customers:

Compared to selecting key customers based on data, selecting potential customers is based on experience. When analyzing the most key customers, we generally find their scale, configuration, location, strength, and other indicative indicators, then screen similar customers for comparison. Those with similar indicative indicators but significantly different performance are identified as potential customers. This is the first method; the second is: during performance analysis discussion meetings, require salespeople to report potential customers and register them; third: during market inspections and checks, discover potential customers.

VI. How to Sort Out Target Customers:

  • Customers where competitors sell well but our products sell poorly are defined as target customers.
  • Customers who refuse to cooperate are defined as target customers.
  • Customers with new channel opportunities are our target customers. (e.g., group purchase merchants)
  • Customers who can combine cross-border marketing are our target customers. (e.g., various brand agents)

VII. Benchmark Customer Sorting Analysis:

Sort and analyze according to management types: ironclad customers, high-quality customers, potential customers, general customers, problem customers.

  • Ironclad customers: Salespeople deeply trusted by customers. Contract content and performance target expectations follow the salesperson's advice, and customers try to exceed the plan. Core products are the customer's first recommended brand.
  • Ironclad customer rate: The proportion of ironclad customers among the total customers served by the salesperson.
  • High-quality customers: Salespeople communicate smoothly with customers, customers actively cooperate with the salesperson's promotion work, and customers always help when the salesperson requests support. Sales targets are achieved without遗留 issues.
  • Customer relationship display: Refers to when, without display support policies, salespeople use customer relationships to persuade customers to do special shelves,堆头, or large-area vivid displays.
  • Potential customers: Refers to customers with good sales ability, but our product sales volume does not match or there is no sales volume.

To encourage salespeople to do a good job in customer sorting, we take benchmark customer sorting as a key indicator for assessing salesperson ability. We recommend a management form for your reference:

VIII. Customer Performance Structure Sorting Analysis

Regularly (quarterly, semi-annually, annually) decompose and analyze the performance composition of target customers, especially analyze sales changes of typical products, find customer market development patterns, compare with advanced indicators in the industry, analyze with customers the reasons for sales rise and fall, and align with the customer's customer groups, predict product sales development trends, and guide customers to make corresponding adjustments. This not only helps customers clarify their thinking and promote performance improvement, but also establishes a professional image in front of customers and maintains good customer relationships.

IX. Regional Sales Key Analysis

Marketing is not about taking the long and making up for the short, but about leveraging strengths and avoiding weaknesses. We should change the old routine of giving policies to customers and being done, to one hand holding the policy and the other hand teaching customers how to use it.

Regularly (quarterly, semi-annually, annually) decompose and analyze the sales composition of specific regions, calculate the sales weight of the region by single product and by grade, find the product sales patterns in the region, determine advanced industry indicators, and provide value reference solutions for customers in the region.

Today's course ends here. Next section we will explain: "Sorting the Resources Behind Customers." Interested friends can come to learn then.

Thank you.

Ma Xingqiang

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Account introduction: 20 years of FMCG distributor operation and management experience, professionally targeting distributor internal:

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