---
title: "The Urgency of Transformation for Brand Owners, Distributors, and Sales Teams: Insights from Alibaba's Retail Link 4.1 New Policy"
description: "Retail Link's recent 4.1 policy, which significantly reduces the income of its city partners, has sparked unrest and highlights the urgent need for digital transformation in FMCG distribution. This shift underscores the weakening role of traditional sales teams and the necessity for brand owners, distributors, and sales personnel to adapt to online, platform-based models."
author: "鲍跃忠"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2019-04-02"
language: "en"
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# The Urgency of Transformation for Brand Owners, Distributors, and Sales Teams: Insights from Alibaba's Retail Link 4.1 New Policy

> Retail Link's recent 4.1 policy, which significantly reduces the income of its city partners, has sparked unrest and highlights the urgent need for digital transformation in FMCG distribution. This shift underscores the weakening role of traditional sales teams and the necessity for brand owners, distributors, and sales personnel to adapt to online, platform-based models.

Recently, Retail Link's launch of the 4.1 new policy has attracted considerable attention in the FMCG industry, especially in the B2B sector.
**(I)**
**The so-called 4.1 marketing new policy is essentially Retail Link's change to the income distribution model for its city partners, with the core being a significant reduction in their income levels.** This has caused unrest among city partners. Previously, some top partners could earn tens of thousands of yuan per month, but now their income is to be cut in half or even more. Naturally, they are unwilling to accept this, so dissatisfaction among partners is certain, and they will inevitably argue with Retail Link.
What are city partners? In simple terms, they are Retail Link's salespeople. However, Retail Link did not build its own sales team like traditional enterprises or other platforms. Instead, leveraging Alibaba's platform DNA, it created a partnership model called city partners, which includes individual partners and enterprise partners. That is, Retail Link does not pay them a salary; instead, it relies on commission and other incentive policies to drive these city partners to achieve their work targets.
What do city partners do? In essence, city partners perform the work of salespeople. But since Retail Link is a platform, the main task of salespeople is first to promote the download of the Retail Link app to small shops, then help them develop the habit of ordering via mobile, especially through the Retail Link app, and then use various customer relationship methods to encourage shops to order more through the app.
Is this job difficult? It will be difficult at the beginning because starting a market requires a lot of work, especially when small shops are not yet familiar with the benefits of mobile ordering, and Retail Link itself is just starting, with limited product assortment and supply chain resources. So there will be some difficulty.
But this process will gradually be resolved. That is, as small shops gradually experience the benefits of mobile ordering and develop the habit, and as Retail Link continuously strengthens its product organization and builds stronger supply chain resources, it will become much easier.
Currently, with the market advancement of the entire B2B industry, small shops' habit of mobile ordering has basically formed. Recently, New Distribution conducted another B2B market survey, showing significant improvements in the coverage rate of B2B app downloads, order frequency, and order volume compared to 2017.
**From Retail Link's perspective, after several years of market development, it has basically completed market coverage, now covering over 1 million small shops.** Especially in the past two years, Retail Link has been vigorously strengthening its supply chain construction, with a significant increase in brand owners joining, and some well-known brands are actively exploring cooperation with Retail Link. So today, the product resources on Retail Link are gradually becoming richer. Today's Retail Link is not the Retail Link of two years ago.
Therefore, in the initial stage, it is necessary to give city partners higher commissions to start the market. However, as the market matures, it is understandable to reduce commission rates and change the income model.
Moreover, Retail Link's initial platform launch phase involved huge investments and significant performance pressure.
**(II)**
In fact, what brand owners, distributors, industry professionals, and sales teams need to pay more attention to is why Retail Link dares to make such adjustments?
Last year, I also wrote an article titled "Why Did Dongpeng Special Drink Dare to Cut Its Sales Team?" which attracted industry attention and reportedly caused many sales teams to worry about losing their jobs.
Although Dongpeng Special Drink later officially stated that the adjustment was only in specific regions and not a complete cut of the sales team, what Dongpeng did, including what Retail Link has recently done, indicates the same industry transformation: in the future environment where FMCG distribution channels become online, enterprise marketing models must change, the traditional functions of sales teams are gradually weakening, and the transformation of sales teams is inevitable.
**What Retail Link is doing is driving the digital transformation of FMCG distribution channels.** Simply put, this transformation changes the way distributors and brand owners rely on people to visit markets, to having small shops order directly via mobile phones.
This approach brings about a very important change in ordering efficiency. In simple terms: originally, salespeople visited a shop once a week; now, shops can place orders independently via mobile, anytime, anywhere, 24/7. This efficiency change is like night and day compared to traditional person-to-person sales or vehicle-based sales.
**More importantly, with this online platform model, Retail Link has captured all the information of small shops into its platform.** Retail Link has already covered over 1 million small shops, and not just coverage; more importantly, it can accurately grasp the information of these 1 million+ shops.
After capturing these shops through the platform, Retail Link can effectively activate them through online methods. Moreover, this online activation method will have greater advantages than the traditional customer relationship activation by salespeople.
Last year, I followed a brand owner's salesperson for a day in Jinan. I saw that the salesperson's ability to develop the market was very limited: when busy, the shop owner had no time to chat because they needed to sell goods; in many shops, the owner was not available, so business couldn't be discussed; and the salesperson also had to meet daily visit targets set by the boss, basically unloading goods, arranging displays, taking photos, uploading, and leaving quickly. Additionally, the salesperson's personal abilities were limited; some lacked communication skills and could barely talk to shop owners. Moreover, a shop owner might receive 30 salespeople in one morning, so they had no mood to discuss business, only wanting to get rid of them quickly.
Therefore, the traditional way of activating shops and markets offline must be re-examined by brand owners and distributors.
But online is different; there are more ways to activate shops. For example, **Retail Link can use product, pricing, subsidy, and marketing methods to more effectively activate shops.**
Including Dongpeng Special Drink, which in recent years has established connections with tens of millions of C-end customers through a one-item-one-code system, activating customers through lid-scanning codes. At the same time, it has established connections with hundreds of thousands of terminal stores through a one-box-one-code system, using the action of scanning the box code to effectively activate terminal stores.
This is the business logic change that will occur in an online transaction environment: **Online transactions have higher transaction efficiency, stronger business capabilities, and through continuous innovation, even stronger business capabilities will be iterated in the future.**
**(III)**
A few suggestions:
> **For brand owners and distributors: It is urgent to accelerate the digital distribution model transformation without hesitation. Especially large brand owners must make changes quickly.**
**The core of this digital distribution model transformation is to improve distribution efficiency, enhance channel control capabilities, and especially significantly improve marketing capabilities.**
Brand owners' channel digital transformation must establish their own digital channel system, using it to connect the entire distribution chain, improving the efficiency and marketing capabilities of the whole chain. In particular, this digital distribution system must have strong capabilities to activate terminal shops.
What is the relationship between a brand owner's own digital distribution system and Retail Link or Xintonglu? It is a cooperative and interconnected relationship. **Facing the gradual formation of this diversified digital distribution system, brand owners should use their own digital distribution platform to connect with various value platforms like Retail Link and Xintonglu. Each platform can help you capture orders more efficiently, and you can effectively activate terminal shops through each platform.**
Cooperation between brand owners, distributors, and B2B platforms is definitely not simple supply; it requires platform-to-platform cooperation, leveraging each B2B platform to unleash marketing capabilities in the online environment.
> **For sales teams: It is too early to talk about unemployment or layoffs, but transformation is necessary.**
In fact, the basic skills of sales teams are almost obsolete and no longer effective.
Facing the current digital distribution environment, they must learn and master digital distribution capabilities.
They need to learn how to connect with customers, cover markets, and effectively activate customers using online methods in a platform environment, thereby improving marketing capabilities.
**Sales personnel must be clear: the future business logic is based on model reconstruction under mobile connectivity.**
Currently, the industry most lacks talent with digital distribution capabilities. Therefore, sales teams must quickly transform into new-type talents with digital distribution capabilities, that is, to quickly add internet to themselves, and to convert their years of industry experience into greater capabilities through platform-based marketing models.
**-END-**


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