Click the image above for details Recently, I've observed an interesting phenomenon: the FMCG industry has not seen high-quality talent entering frontline sales for a long time. Even companies like P&G find it very difficult to recruit graduates from Tsinghua or Peking University, let alone frontline grassroots employees at Coca-Cola or Master Kong. -01- A brand HR friend complained to me that their company's salespeople are leaving in large numbers. I said, your products are harder to sell than insurance, and they earn less than delivery drivers or food delivery couriers. How can you retain salespeople? We see that many frontline supervisors and managers at leading brands only earn 4,000 to 5,000 yuan when they first join, while in a market environment where food delivery and courier income is approaching 10,000 yuan, how can you retain them? The inability to attract excellent talent is a surface phenomenon. On one hand, this field is not cool or leading enough; more importantly, this field cannot afford to pay higher wages to excellent talent! Talking to many veteran marketers, around 2000, if you had the opportunity to enter FMCG sales, the income was very good, and it was a job envied by many. But today, the frontline income of many brand salespeople has not increased for years, while current prices and housing costs have risen to what level! On one hand, intense competition has led to a zero-sum game in the market, leaving everyone without profits. On the other hand, sales costs remain high. The deep distribution model is based on past big single products, cheap labor, cheap traffic, and low sales costs, forming a complete distribution system. Today, the biggest pain for all enterprises is that the existing deep distribution system has insufficient human efficiency. Companies support tens of thousands of salespeople to serve millions of small shops, but the output per person is extremely low. This inefficient business model has not been iterated for many years. Many companies' terminal operations are almost no different from ten years ago! At the same time, many internet-famous brands, through e-commerce live streaming, achieve sales of millions or tens of millions in a single session, causing many brand executives to have an illusion: rather than selling one by one, it's better to do a live stream. Now many companies are studying new retail, new social e-commerce, new community group buying, and new short-video e-commerce, but no one is studying how to do new sales. You know, in today's Chinese market, there are still over 5 million mom-and-pop shops. Among the over 20 million marketing personnel, most are grassroots, still running small shops and stores as salespeople and promoters. They are the ones who support hundreds of billions in sales and become the foundational force of FMCG brand empires! Should deep distribution be done? This is not a judgment question but a choice question! As long as mom-and-pop shops exist, it must be done. For now, mom-and-pop shops cannot be replaced in the short term. Terminal shelves still need to be squeezed into, and in a highly competitive environment, we must rely on people to do a lot of competitive actions. Therefore, the key remaining is how to do it. Improving human efficiency, using fewer people to do more precise things, and how to generate greater sales volume has become the core that all enterprises must deeply think about and implement. -02- We see that many companies have adopted digital tools, proposed digital strategy slogans, built their own B2B trading systems, O2O systems, SFA systems, etc. The original intention is good: to improve efficiency and reduce costs. But what are the results? Many tool software on the market look similar, but when used, they are vastly different. This has led many companies to reflect: Are digital tools effective? Why can't digital tools significantly improve human efficiency? Is it a software problem? Here we need to think critically: What is the core of a tool? Is it to manage people? To firmly pin people to routes? Monitoring? Visualization? Dataization? Quantification? Process evaluation? Or is it to drive growth? To increase a salesperson's daily sales from 3,000 yuan to 10,000 yuan? I believe the core of digitalization is to empower people, to help frontline sales personnel complete their distribution and sales promotion work more efficiently, faster, and more accurately, enabling salespeople to manage 300 or 400 stores instead of the past 150, with lower difficulty and better results. So empowerment is the core value of digital tools! Think about the Gulf War: What was the US military's information system doing for American soldiers? Was it monitoring them? It was assisting soldiers and monitoring the enemy. It was positioning, aiming, engaging at long range, helping them complete combat missions more excellently and efficiently. But what are most companies' salesperson tools doing today? They are actually monitoring, assessing, and managing salespeople! Every day, headquarters clerks manage things like checking attendance, checking routes, checking visit counts, then holding meetings, fines, and assessments! If you treat salespeople like thieves, what do you think they treat you as? -03- Maximizing transaction efficiency cannot be separated from human nature, scenarios, and tools: 1. Human nature: A salesperson's work is different from a delivery driver's. For a delivery driver, they just need to follow the APP instructions, pick up goods at the store, navigate to the destination, and make a call. The work is highly standardized with no complexity; anyone can do it. But a salesperson is different. Salespeople perform sales actions, persuading small shops to order, and through hands-on work, squeezing out a little space in highly competitive refrigerators to place our products. When I was in sales, I taught salespeople a mantra: for summer beverages, you need to "lift, cut, paste, move, place, and stuff." This is not just execution; it requires certain abilities and skills. You can only tell salespeople what to do, but how to do it and whether they want to do it, you cannot control. So this kind of non-standardized work requires activating the salesperson's initiative, making them willing to do it voluntarily. Therefore, the internal management logic of digital tools must align with human nature, become a productivity tool, and by using the tool, reduce the difficulty of their work, making them willing to do it. 2. Scenarios: Regarding how to sell goods, I find many friends have a misconception: they think that displaying goods at the terminal and pasting posters on the wall is enough. The real purpose of display and posters is to create a purchasing atmosphere. In middle school biology textbooks, we all learned a medical term called conditioned reflex. It means that if you feed a puppy meat every time while ringing a bell, after a while, when you ring the bell, the puppy will instinctively salivate. Let's apply this to humans with an analogy. I'll say a few advertising slogans, and see your reaction:

This holiday, don't accept gifts: ......

Afraid of getting heaty, drink: ...... How about it? When I say the first half, don't you automatically fill in the second half? This is conditioned reflex. Our sales are not done just by display. If you cannot make users instinctively pick up your product, your display is ineffective. How to build a purchasing atmosphere that makes users instinctively buy is the core of our terminal sales. 3. Tools: The essence of tools, as mentioned earlier, is like the hoe in a farmer's hand, the steering wheel in a driver's hand, the computer for an IT engineer. Our salespeople need tools to maximize terminal work efficiency. The core of the tool is the sales promotion logic behind it, the empowerment system based on that logic, and the management philosophy surrounding that empowerment system. In summary, a tool is a sword, and the sword manual behind the sword is more important than the sword. In martial arts novels, true masters can hurt people with falling flowers and flying leaves. A child, even with a sword, can only use it to cut vegetables and play house. The key is how you use the tool. Tools are meant to improve the efficiency of terminal salespeople, guiding them on how to fight more efficiently and accurately. The core of the tool is to integrate the aforementioned human nature and scenarios into every action of the salesperson through the tool, making them act proactively, achieve results, and drive sales. Efficiency is essentially a generational gap in combat tools. Grasp the core of sales promotion. Only with human nature and scenarios can true efficiency be generated. Regarding the practical application and development trends of digital tools, New Distribution will hold two forums on "Digital Technology Driving New Enterprise Growth" at the 2020 (3rd) China FMCG Conference in Shanghai from August 24 to August 26. At that time, New Distribution will invite more founders of digital tool service providers and brand executives who have applied these tools to discuss how to improve business efficiency through digital technology. Interested friends should not miss it!