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Articles by 崔自三
Browse 63 New Distribution articles by 崔自三.
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Preparing for the Year-End: Promotions Can Be Done This Way
The year-end is a prime opportunity for FMCG companies to turn around their annual sales performance. Well-executed promotions can not only boost sales and achieve a strong start, but also lay the groundwork for the coming year's marketing strategy. How should promotional plans be designed to help improve year-end performance? Let's discuss this with specific cases.
崔自三What to Do in the Golden Sales Season?
Manufacturers must strategically leverage the peak sales season to boost sales and profits. Key actions include optimizing product structure, launching new products, integrating distributors, improving network layout, innovating promotions, building channel barriers, strengthening teams, and enhancing brand reputation, while also paying attention to market trends, competitors, coordination, and avoiding pitfalls like cross-regional selling.
崔自三Warning | Distributors, These Five "Bargains" from Manufacturers You Must Not Take!
Distributors must stay vigilant and not be fooled by manufacturers' sweet talk. The article warns against five tempting but dangerous offers: advance payment subsidies, unusually large promotions, excessive returns on prepayments, inventory subsidies, and attractive shelf-stocking policies, all of which can lead to financial losses.
崔自三Three Key Strategies for Peak Season Sales
As the peak season approaches, FMCG manufacturers must focus on product sell-through after stocking up. This article outlines three essential preheating steps: terminal activation, appropriate promotional pull, and service marketing, to ensure products move quickly from warehouses to consumers.
崔自三Distributors' Puzzles and Solutions: Talent, Management, Capital, Brand, and Channels
This article addresses common challenges faced by FMCG distributors in China, including talent retention, management efficiency, capital constraints, brand building, and channel strategy, providing practical solutions for each.
崔自三How Distributors Can Boost Sales and Profits During the Peak Season
Recently, many distributors of instant noodles, liquor, biscuits, and other products have contacted the author to discuss how to increase sales volume and profits during the peak selling season. They face many misconceptions and confusions regarding balancing sales and profits, as well as planning for the peak season market, which are common issues among FMCG distributors. Indeed, the peak season is the last 'bet' distributors can make in a year, often the last chance to turn around after a loss-making off-season.
崔自三Distributors: Manufacturers Shouldn't 'Help' the Wrong Way—Don't Give Water When Hungry, or Bread When Thirsty!
What do distributors need from manufacturers? This seemingly simple question is actually complex. Manufacturers must first understand distributors' intrinsic needs at different development stages—startup, growth, and maturity—and tailor support accordingly, rather than offering generic help that misses the mark.
崔自三When the Market Is Tough, Distributors Must Do a Better Job of Customer Relationship Management—Here Are 5 Tips to Take Away!
In 2015, the domestic economy slowed down, and the current overall macro environment is highly challenging. Manufacturers are having a hard time, and distributors are also struggling. In this new competitive landscape, not only is the pace of industry reshuffling accelerating, but it also represents a life-and-death test for distributors. So, how can distributors survive the winter and still develop under the pressure of "survival of the fittest" and "survival of the remaining"? In a sluggish market, customer resources will be even more fiercely contested. To outmaneuver competitors and win a new round of victory, distributors must, under the guidance of manufacturers—or even on their own initiative—proactively and consciously manage customer relationships.
崔自三How Can a Sales Supervisor Manage Both Business Growth and Organizational Development?
Case study: Li Bin, a sales supervisor at an FMCG company producing instant noodles and beverages, was promoted to regional supervisor after turning around a struggling market into a company benchmark through hard work and strategic thinking. However, his new region was a blank market with huge potential but required significant organizational development. Li Bin quickly developed the market, even signing three clients in one month, but as his team grew to twelve people, sales became unstable and even declined, leading him to confusion and frustration.
崔自三How Should Distributors Cleverly Handle Manufacturers' Pressure to Stock Up?
During training sessions with many manufacturer distributors, some distributors often complain about manufacturers pressuring them to stock up excessively to boost market share and meet sales targets. Since regional market capacity is limited, overstocking can lead to inventory pile-up and cash flow issues, leaving distributors in a dilemma. This article explores how distributors can tactfully respond to such pressure.
崔自三Off-Season Work Manual for the FMCG Industry
As autumn arrives and beverage sales enter the off-season, this article explores strategies to keep the market active. It emphasizes shifting mindsets, integrating product lines, expanding channels, strengthening customer relations, providing systematic training, and enforcing market assessments to ensure off-season sales remain robust.
崔自三How to Grow from "Busy, Confused, Blind" to an Enlightened Distributor?
Among the clients trained by the author, there is a distributor with annual sales of hundreds of millions of yuan who has successively represented several famous brands and achieved the largest market share in its region. Moreover, it has upgraded its brand, market, and channels, established its own production plant, registered its own product brand, and created a dual business model of "trading company + industrial company," pioneering a new path for development. It can be regarded as a model of successful transformation for distributors, having reached the level of a brand operator. However, the author has also encountered many confused distributors who struggle to develop.
崔自三Three Strategies for Peak Season Sales
Before the peak season, after FMCG manufacturers have stocked up and pushed inventory to distributors, the next step is to drive product sell-through. Sell-through is more important than stocking because only when products truly move through the channel can the 'dangerous leap from commodity to money' be achieved, meeting sales and profit targets. To achieve hot sales, manufacturers must do three things: activate terminals, use promotions, and provide excellent service.
崔自三Most of the Money You Earn Is Wasted on Inefficient Distribution!
Many distributors find that despite high sales volumes, their profits are not as expected. The key is to cut costs and increase efficiency, especially in distribution. This article provides practical advice on how to plan distribution routes, prepare properly, standardize procedures, and pay attention to details to achieve low-cost and effective distribution.
崔自三Taking the Pulse of Distributors: Is Your Company Engaging in Pseudo-Corporate Management?
During training sessions with distributors, I often observe two interesting phenomena: some distributors register a company but don't know how to proceed with corporate management; others implement corporate management but only superficially, with a shell but no substance. This article explores why distributors struggle to implement true standardized corporate management.
崔自三How to Be a Profitable Distributor?
Becoming a profitable distributor is a dream for many in the industry, but it's challenging in today's competitive and sluggish market. Based on years of research on successful distributors, the author identifies key traits: having a profit-oriented mindset, being adaptable to market changes, fostering win-win partnerships, maintaining a broad vision, and mastering management skills.
崔自三How Should Distributors Design Their Compensation System?
Many distributors operate and manage their businesses in a rough and disorderly manner, especially in terms of compensation, which lacks forward-looking planning and systems, significantly hindering their rapid development. To stay ahead of competitors and gain more growth space, distributors must design a reasonable compensation system based on their company size and development stage, making it a perpetual motion machine for high-speed enterprise growth. Current problems in distributor compensation systems include: 1. No standardized system. Since many distributor companies employ family members, they see no need to establish a compensation system, let alone a written policy.
崔自三Distribution in County and Township Markets: To Distribute Goods Well, First Distribute 'Hearts'
Salespeople often encounter awkward situations during distribution: first, county and township distributors are increasingly picky, making it harder to accept new product distribution, sometimes failing entirely; second, even if products are placed on shelves out of respect for the dealer, they don't sell and gather dust. In actual market operations, such cold receptions are common. Distribution is the prerequisite for FMCG, especially new products, to enter county and township markets and successfully achieve the 'daring leap from commodity to money.' But why do these strange phenomena occur—products not being distributed, or even if distributed, not selling?
崔自三How Should Distributors Formulate Their Strategy and Planning in 2016?
For distributors, formulating their own strategy and planning essentially means understanding a fundamental principle: what is their future mission or task? That is, what is their future value proposition, and what goals do they aim to achieve in the coming period? In short, strategy is about doing the right things; with the right direction, distributors can then develop their tactics and plans accordingly.
崔自三How to Write a Qualified Work Report? (With Downloadable Template)
Many readers have asked how to write a work report. This article provides a detailed template from a well-known beverage brand's regional manager position. To download it, reply "述职报告" in the official account. It also discusses common pitfalls and offers guidance on structuring an effective report.
崔自三How Should Distributors Cleverly Distribute Year-End Bonuses?
A case study: Lao Zhang, an FMCG distributor, feels anxious every year when distributing year-end bonuses, not because he is reluctant to give them, but because after each distribution, some employees, including key staff, resign. This article analyzes the reasons and provides practical tips on how to distribute year-end bonuses effectively, such as maintaining confidentiality, splitting bonuses, considering seniority, combining material and spiritual rewards, and choosing appropriate timing and locations.
崔自三Countdown to Spring Festival: 9 Factors and 1 Rule to Help Distributors Decide How Much to Stock
For holiday stocking, many distributors have had frustrating experiences: due to poor planning and insufficient stock, they run out of products at the peak of sales, missing out on profits; conversely, some overestimate market conditions and stock excessively, leading to overstock and forced clearance after the holiday. Thus, holiday stocking requires a balance. This article analyzes nine factors affecting holiday sales and introduces the 1.5x safety stock rule to help distributors determine optimal stock levels.
崔自三What Should We Do About Expired Products Left by Old Customers?
Recently, during a training session, the author received a letter seeking help: "I am a marketing representative for a daily chemical company, responsible for operations in three county-level markets. In 2010, I took over a new market, which was not entirely new but rather a 'half-baked' market where the previous distributor had terminated cooperation with the company for various reasons. After taking over, I opened a new distributor. Just as I was ambitious and confident to make a big push, while distributing goods with the new distributor, I found that the products previously distributed to wholesale and retail stores by the old customer had not been sold out, and to my surprise, these products, ranging from three to five boxes or bottles, had already expired. Every time we go to distribute, these wholesale or retail stores demand that if we want them to continue selling, we must exchange the expired products; otherwise, they won't sell. I am in a dilemma: if we exchange, who bears the loss? If we don't, the market cannot continue, and it may dampen the new distributor's confidence. What should I do?"
崔自三Year-End Review: How Distributors Can 'Carry Forward the Past and Open Up the Future'
Year-end is a critical period for distributors to carry forward the past and open up the future. They must not only follow the pace of manufacturers in ordering and stocking products and arranging Spring Festival promotion schedules, but also summarize and review their own business performance over the past year, and look ahead to new plans and goals for the coming year. So what should distributors be busy with? Reviewing goal achievement: The achievement of sales targets is the most basic requirement for distributors to survive and develop. At the very least, we need to check the actual completion of the following goals...
崔自三