---
title: "Understanding Distributors Through the 'Six Types' of Supermarket Merchandising by Salespeople"
description: "As living standards rise and the FMCG market grows, competition has intensified, making terminal display crucial. This article categorizes salespeople's merchandising behaviors into six types—irresponsible, perfunctory, aggressive, meticulous, leveraging, and comprehensive—and analyzes how distributor mindsets, management, employee treatment, and family-style management shape these differences, emphasizing that only modern distributors can build teams that win at the terminal."
author: "刘连喜"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2015-01-30"
language: "en"
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markdown: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/understanding-distributors-through-the-six-types-of-supermarket-merchand-9ec9edb0.md"
original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/g95yPndUEB9MgxRJ-iwTAA"
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# Understanding Distributors Through the 'Six Types' of Supermarket Merchandising by Salespeople

> As living standards rise and the FMCG market grows, competition has intensified, making terminal display crucial. This article categorizes salespeople's merchandising behaviors into six types—irresponsible, perfunctory, aggressive, meticulous, leveraging, and comprehensive—and analyzes how distributor mindsets, management, employee treatment, and family-style management shape these differences, emphasizing that only modern distributors can build teams that win at the terminal.

Warm reminder: Click the blue text above, "FMCG Distributor Professional Consulting," to learn more about marketing and distributor internal management.

With the improvement of people's living standards and the rapid growth of the consumer market, competition in the FMCG industry has reached a fever pitch, and market operations have entered an era of refinement. Marketing concepts such as accurate positioning, market segmentation, intensive channel cultivation, and winning at the terminal have long been deeply ingrained. The criteria for measuring market excellence have shifted from a single focus on sales volume to a preference for product terminal performance, including distribution rate, image promotion, price system, and terminal display. Especially terminal display—now almost all FMCG manufacturers deeply recognize that supermarket and terminal store shelves are where products intimately meet consumers. Thus, a vigorous "enclosure movement" has begun. Manufacturers are spending heavily to purchase supermarket floor displays, pillar displays, and prime shelf positions, and it's not uncommon to see fierce fights over a floor display. Many savvy manufacturers no longer rely solely on supermarket merchandisers to maintain their product facings; instead, they add a new function to their salespeople's duties—merchandising. Well-funded manufacturers hire dedicated merchandisers to maintain key accounts.

As a frontline marketing professional, I have worked in Northeast, North, West, and East China, conducting in-depth research on grassroots salespeople's supermarket merchandising. Here, I categorize "salesperson merchandising behaviors" into six types for study.

1. Irresponsible Type: This type of salesperson visits supermarket accounts for only two things: checking inventory upon entering the store and taking orders before leaving. If asked, "Why don't you merchandise?" they retort confidently, "Merchandising is the supermarket staff's job. Why should I do it for them? With that time, I could order dozens more cases! Orders mean money! If any store doesn't display my products well, I'll complain about their merchandiser."

But what do supermarket staff say? "Your products used to sell about the same as XXX, but now XXX sells at least five times more than yours." I asked, "Why?" The merchandiser said, "Isn't it obvious? XXX has better shelf space than you. Their products are on the golden positions on shelves 2, 3, and 4, while yours are on the bottom shelf 5. Their facing is more than four times larger than yours. They're neatly arranged, clean, looking down from above, superior in quality, winning by quantity, and occupying all the advantages of location and people. They're bound to sell better than you! Duh! And you call yourselves marketers!" I said with a grimace, "You're playing favorites! You give XXX such good shelf space and put us at the bottom, not even caring about old dates. Are we stepchildren?" The merchandiser said, "You can't blame me entirely. XXX has great service; their salesperson organizes the shelf every visit. Initially, your shelf space was the same as XXX's, but since your salespeople never organize the shelf, naturally XXX gradually squeezed you out. I manage such a large section, and there's too much to stock to take care of every brand. Besides, the total sales for this category are fixed; it doesn't matter to me who sells more or less—my shelf contribution rate is the same. And since XXX sells much more than you now, of course I give the best positions to the best-selling products! Your products entering a vicious cycle only shows one thing—your market service is inferior to your competitors'!"

The result of such merchandising is simple: product display deteriorates, and products gradually become unsellable.

2. Perfunctory Type: This type of salesperson, under company pressure, will usually restock the shelves when entering the supermarket, but their method is very "efficient": they bring goods from the warehouse to the shelf, ignoring item category, flavor, horizontal or vertical display, or even first-in-first-out, and just stuff the shelves haphazardly. Once full, they clap their hands—done. Such "efficient" restocking is worse than none! Why? Because after a while, the back of the shelf is full of expired products.

3. Aggressive Expansion Type: These salespeople clearly know that the larger the display facing, the greater the sales opportunity. So they often "conquer" the product display area with their own products, even squeezing out best-selling competitors until they have no place to stand. At the same time, they are "very methodical"—like Japanese invaders entering the village, they come quietly! The result? When discovered, they often provoke public outrage, causing supermarket section leaders and competitor staff to "attack them collectively," sending their products to the "cold palace." Some powerful stores even send a fine to the salesperson's boss.

4. Meticulous and Serious Type: These salespeople usually have received corporate training and follow standardized operating procedures. While making product displays attractive as required by the company, they also handle product and shelf cleaning, POP posting, replacing damaged price tags, and exchanging goods. The terminal performance in areas managed by such salespeople is generally well maintained.

5. Leveraging Type: These salespeople are generally quick-witted, articulate, and good at communication. With a mouth sweeter than honey, they often flatter supermarket merchandisers until they're delighted, and occasionally offer tasting samples or promotional items to win them over. In general, supermarket staff are accommodating to such salespeople, and the product shelves basically don't require much effort from the salesperson—the supermarket merchandiser will take good care of them.

6. Comprehensive and Capable Type: These salespeople have both a serious work attitude and rich merchandising experience and display skills. Most valuable is their competitive awareness and the goal of comprehensively surpassing competitors in terminal display, always remembering to attack competitors. While merchandising, they quietly squeeze competitors' display space, coordinate with merchandisers to optimize product display positions, reasonably use manufacturer funds to create key image model stores, and apply for free floor displays from supermarket staff during promotions.

From the above, it's clear that different merchandising methods yield completely different results. Why do such differences exist among salespeople in terminal merchandising? What's the gap? The differences are only three: attitude, method, and mindset.

Every manufacturer hopes to have meticulous, serious, flexible, and capable salespeople, but where do the roots of these operational differences lie?

1. Distributor Mindset Issues: Many distributors come from wholesale backgrounds, have limited education, are accustomed to traditional distribution models, have weak terminal control, and lack service awareness. One of my county-level distributors has annual sales exceeding 10 million yuan, which should be considered good, but the terminal performance of the products they distribute is generally poor, and every new product they take on dies. One sentence from them made me understand: "I never let my salespeople merchandise because that's the supermarket merchandiser's job; it has nothing to do with us." Salespeople from such distributors generally fall into two types: irresponsible or leveraging.

2. Management and Operational Level Issues: Many distributors have small companies, often with one person holding multiple roles (salesperson, driver, delivery worker), lacking sound management systems and loose personnel management. They don't emphasize salesperson training, lack standardized operating procedures, and many newly hired inexperienced salespeople are sent directly to the market—experience is gained through practice. Salespeople from such distributors are generally the first three types.

3. Neglecting Employee Compensation: This type of distributor is the classic "wanting the horse to run but not letting it graze." They offer low compensation but high demands, leading to "policies from above, countermeasures from below"—the perfunctory type.

4. Family-Style Management: Traditional distributors mostly use family-style management or have strong family-style characteristics, often hiring based on kinship rather than merit. Non-family employees are often ostracized by family employees, eventually creating rifts, internal disunity, and low motivation among external employees.

5. New-Era Distributors: For them, business is not just a business but a career; they don't focus only on immediate gains but look to the long term. They don't treat employees as money-making tools but as the cornerstone of the company's long-term development. They provide incentive-based compensation models to stimulate salespeople's work enthusiasm and creativity; they focus on employee growth and improving business skills, often inviting excellent sales managers from manufacturers to conduct sales training for their salespeople, absorbing advanced experience, and improving operating procedures and management systems. Only such distributors can cultivate meticulous, serious, flexible, and capable sales teams, and only then can they win at the terminal in market competition.

Daonong recently opened a public account specifically discussing how traditional enterprises can excel at WeChat marketing. If you're interested, you can follow it. Search for the WeChat ID above or scan the QR code below to follow.

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