Are sales representatives really 'out selling'?

Starting with a hot topic in the FMCG industry:

#Why are young people unwilling to become FMCG sales reps?# #Have they all switched to food delivery or ride-hailing?#

If you are an outsider to FMCG, what do you imagine a sales representative looks like? A young, energetic face? Neatly dressed, with an electric scooter, a large-screen phone equipped with SFA (Sales Force Automation), chatting and laughing with store owners, shaking hands to close deals... Sorry, that scene only appears in corporate promotional videos. The reality is quite different: frontline sales reps often engage in a lot of low-efficiency, repetitive work. For example:

Checking product displays, helping stores with shelf restocking, collecting competitor information, recording production dates, and so on.

Such work is repeated at 10-20 stores a day. After eight hours, they top the step count, spend a lot on travel, and half the time is spent on the road. When they finally reach a store, they often can't see the owner, can't confirm orders, and find it hard to negotiate key matters like paid displays.

Is the 'human wave' strategy still useful?

Recent discussions with several clients' sales directors revealed that while retail has always been about winning at the point of execution, it's becoming harder to recruit young sales reps, sales budgets are insufficient, and digital transformation is progressing slowly.

Frontline sales reps have low visibility, limited promotion prospects, and slow income growth—these are undeniable facts that affect each other.

This generation of post-95s lacks the willingness and determination to become FMCG sales reps. In today's digital transformation of offline channels, the 'human wave' strategy of many years is no longer viable.

Mr. Wang is the VP of RTM (Route to Market) at a mid-tier national consumer goods company, responsible for optimizing sales operations. The company has over 3,000 frontline sales reps/DSRs nationwide, with annual costs for salaries, administration, travel, and risk control exceeding 200 million RMB. Without changing the coverage model, the company still can't cover all outlets, costs increase year by year, and per-point returns decline.

Mr. Wang explained:

"Over the years, the national minimum wage and average social wage have been rising continuously, which is a huge burden for traditional FMCG companies like ours that rely heavily on labor. Taking our headquarters in Shanghai as an example, our per-capita frontline cost increase has been in double digits in the past two years, and in many rapidly growing cities, such as some provincial capitals in the central and western regions, the increase is even larger."

(Data source: Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Statistics)

A year ago, Mr. Wang's company collaborated with Xiaoling Technology on a meaningful project and tested an effective offline coverage solution. The logic is simple: seek efficiency through specialized division of labor, hand over tedious repetitive tasks to a crowdsourcing platform, and let excellent sales reps return to their core selling duties.

Specifically, routine execution tasks such as verification, information collection, shelf restocking, inventory counting, and market research are crowdsourced to the Ailingong platform, where professional gig workers with specific tags complete them. Order-related tasks, after data conversion, are then efficiently handled by the core sales team through online follow-up and scheduled visits.

Currently, the Ailingong platform has hundreds of thousands of professional gig workers in the FMCG industry, with over 60 skill tags, including key skills like 'shelf restocking', 'market research', 'mystery shopping', 'simple sales', 'inventory counting', and 'consumer interviews', to meet client needs to the greatest extent, truly achieving 'use nearby people to do professional work'.

Did the small goal set at the beginning of the year come true?

Going back to Mr. Wang's small goal a year ago: with the budget unchanged or even reduced, he hoped to retain the excellent sales team within a core of 1,000 people, while doubling the number of effectively covered stores.

Through Xiaoling Technology's solution over the past year, Mr. Wang's company has become lighter, execution projects more flexible, idle personnel resources significantly reduced, recruitment pressure eased, and most importantly, business has grown!

Not long ago, Mr. Wang did the math: previously, in the key retail coverage of Wanxian (Wanzhou District) in Chongqing, the Chongqing sales team had to visit stores. Besides a full day's travel time and expenses, overcoming mountain roads and DSR line issues, the comprehensive cost was about 2,000 RMB per visit to execute a comprehensive promotion and obtain a batch of orders. It took at least five days round trip, and they had to go at least once a month.

Now, with the new crowdsourcing combined with sales model, local gig workers in Wanxian have already gathered basic information at a very low cost, and even executed simple activities on time. Sales reps can prepare materials, products, and even order contracts, and go once with a clear purpose, greatly improving efficiency, and the round trip takes only two days.

Moreover, through online visit tools, the actual frequency of business trips can be reduced to once a quarter, and for routine matters, they can just assign tasks to gig workers. The sales team saves time to do more core sales work, cover more markets, and the comprehensive cost is halved. There are many examples like Wanxian across the country.

Additionally, Mr. Wang added:

"From a broader financial perspective, the third-party expense conversion of marketing personnel costs also helps the company's sales expenses achieve maximum flexibility, while reducing travel and other employment risks and hidden costs like recruitment, providing good support and buffering for rapid strategic iteration and tactical adjustments."

The secret to helping enterprises achieve more efficient marketing digitalization

Of course, the efficient and smooth flow of tens of millions of consumer goods client tasks from hundreds of users on the Ailingong platform each year relies not only on an operational platform and team, but also on a lot of black technology and AI applications, such as:

SKU image recognition, intelligent outbound calls, intelligent store expansion, intelligent scheduling, image stitching, OCR, NLP, and more. Each technological innovation and application subtly provides value to clients.

China's multi-level administrative structure creates a unique offline consumption landscape. Over 2,000 county-level administrative regions, 6.5 million retail consumer goods outlets, over 10 million foodservice consumer points, and dozens of retail formats are target markets for FMCG clients.

Xiaoling Technology's mission is to provide efficient, flexible digital and intelligent offline marketing solutions for consumer goods companies.

With the core sales team + platform gig worker execution model, Xiaoling Technology helps consumer goods enterprises elevate marketing digitalization efficiency to new heights.

Xiaoling Technology states, 'Only when clients grow does Xiaoling's value lie, and we look forward to more companies like Mr. Wang's growing together with Xiaoling Technology.'

To learn more about Xiaoling Technology, scan the QR code below for a quick link↓

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