A ten-year veteran salesperson at a certain company put it bluntly: "All management that does not aim at performance growth is just playing dirty." He added: "I'm being crushed by all kinds of departments. There's no pioneering spirit in the work now, no aggressiveness in chasing sales volume, and no strategic thinking in doing market work."
The number of SOP regulations in the company exceeds my salary, he said. Behind the complaints of salespeople is the reality of wages falling from 8,000 yuan to 4,500 yuan, barely enough to make ends meet.
Management for the Sake of Management
Nowadays, when listening to frontline salespeople chat, what you often hear is nostalgia for the old days. But upon closer conversation, you realize those days may not have been as good as imagined. "Back then, the company's repayment plan was chased three times a day, and performance gaps were reviewed once a week. The production and marketing department, HR department, and procurement department in the back office didn't necessarily leave work earlier than the sales department. The production and marketing department set tasks based on salespeople's repayments, procurement negotiated costs based on orders, and HR formulated recruitment, benefits, and incentive demands based on market needs."
From the veteran salesperson's words, it's clear that performance relied on stuffing inventory into channels, draining the market dry. It was just that they happened to catch that era when "performance depended on pushing inventory."
The company entered a new era, introducing more advanced management concepts: last-place elimination, accountability to individuals, refined management, and other professional knowledge. SOPs multiplied, departments grew larger, and the burden on salespeople increased. And all these departments set assessment standards for salespeople.
In the past, the company's production and marketing department formulated production and sales strategies based on salespeople's annual sales performance and orders. The underlying principle was to satisfy salespeople's product needs as much as possible, provided it met the company's minimum order quantities and other basic principles. Today, the relationship between the production and marketing department and the sales team is that production is production and sales is sales. You sell your goods, I make my products. If I overproduce, you figure out how to push inventory. If you're out of stock, and I can't produce enough, you just wait.
In the past, the production and marketing department encouraged product managers to develop new products, promote new products, and coordinate production line adjustments and equipment modifications. Now, before anything is done, the first question is about who is responsible for what. If performance targets aren't met, who pays for the equipment modification costs?
So what frontline salespeople often can't understand is: a certain product sells so well in the market, why doesn't the company produce it? Consumer preferences for bottle shapes have already changed, why is the company still using bottle shapes from over a decade ago? Is it really that hard to adjust a production line?
Salespeople don't understand: the market needs sugar-free beverages, health drinks, large bottles of water, and so on. The company can do OEM production for other companies for these products, even at prices lower than what its own team gets. For example, the popular bottle shapes of Guozishule, Qingshang, and IF Coconut Water on the market today each have a traditional company behind them. These bottle shapes originated from these traditional beverage companies, but their own company can't use them. Then there are the beverages sold at Yonghui and Sam's Club, which are also OEM-produced by traditional companies. Why can channels get lower prices than the company's distributors and salespeople?
Behind this is the question of who is responsible for changing bottle shapes and promoting new categories.
In the past, the HR department aimed to ensure everyone's benefits were full and quickly fill staffing gaps. Whether using third-party outsourcing or letting salespeople hire from external staff at low wages, a promising future was always offered. Now? The HR department's assessment is about how to save personnel costs and reduce labor expenses. The result is that last year's achievement policies set for salespeople, if truly completed this year, must be found ways to reduce. Last year there were 20,000 employees; this year it might drop to 15,000. Labor costs have fallen from an average salary of 3,500 yuan for salespeople to 3,000 yuan, and there's even consideration of shifting salespeople from formal employment to distributor employment. And the costs saved by these HR departments are exactly the KPI assessments of HR-related departments. So who still cares about the wages of frontline salespeople or the turnover rate of sales staff?
Furthermore, the company's inspection or audit department. In the past, inspection was about checking factory and production line safety compliance issues, checking expired products on shelves in frontline markets, checking distributor personnel for inventory stuffing or cross-territory sales, and checking for counterfeit goods from other companies. Now, what's inspected is whether salespeople's frontline expenses have been implemented, whether they've been implemented according to company requirements, corruption issues in the sales process, and whether salespeople have colluded with distributors to cheat the company out of expenses... Of course, theoretically, the purpose of these actions is fine. But the company sets annual targets for the inspection department on how many employees to fire and how much in expenses to uncover. It even tells the inspection department that 10% of uncovered expenses will be given as commission. Under such a strategy, targeting people and expenses becomes the inspection department's real core job. All the components that helped salespeople are gone. The result is that salespeople would rather lose retail outlets than change their execution.
Rule by People or Rule by Law?
If we view a fast-moving consumer goods company as a historical dynasty, the administrative departments are civil officials, and the frontline sales force is military generals. The civil officials' strategy is to protect their own positions and limit the power of the military generals. Over the years, there have been more and more civil officials with growing power, while frontline military generals have become fewer and fewer.
But when it comes to treating salespeople, let's look at what NONGFU SPRING (SEHK: 09633) does. It's simply job rotation. Each provincial manager stays in a province for two years. During these two years, you won't have your own faction, because salespeople won't feel that aligning with you means you'll take them along to the next place, nor will they feel that aligning with you will bring more benefits. Two years isn't even enough for everyone to get familiar with each other.
From a sales perspective, would such rotation reduce team combat effectiveness, since you have to leave before you've even gotten familiar with a market? Not at all. In NONGFU SPRING's rotations over the past few years, many managers have been able to exercise more initiative. Outstanding examples come from the three northeastern provinces, Beijing, Henan, and Xinjiang. Previously, in the three northeastern provinces, local water and specialty beverages made it very difficult for NONGFU SPRING to gain ground. But in recent years, on one hand, Wahaha itself has been weakening; on the other hand, the rise of Oriental Leaf has driven NONGFU SPRING's sales in the three northeastern provinces ever higher. In Beijing, NONGFU SPRING surpassed Coca-Cola. In Henan, NONGFU SPRING's Oriental Leaf also suppressed the previously prevalent gift herbal tea and ready-to-drink green tea markets in the region. Markets once taken by Wahaha have also been reclaimed.
It's worth mentioning the Xinjiang region. Oriental Leaf only began to flourish across the country after rising in Xinjiang. Before Oriental Leaf, Xinjiang was also a key sales market for Wahaha. Wahaha's per capita consumption in the area exceeded that of Coca-Cola.
At the same time, rotation can also prevent sales managers from developing arrogance. Many companies' sales directors, when in a good market, believe their abilities are sufficient and develop the mentality that only they can succeed in that place. After being transferred to another region, they often get "taken out" by local salespeople working together. Because of such unexpected outcomes, many companies believe rotation will drive away a group of "excellent people," and the result of rotation will cause a temporary decline in market sales. For the sake of short-term goals, they can only let the market continue on its original track.
But have companies ever considered that these so-called excellent people may themselves have management problems, and the temporary decline in market sales is precisely because too many landmines have been buried in the market, just well-covered up in the past?
Some will also stand up and say that the company's many SOPs are meant to avoid rule by people, and the company is transitioning to rule by law. Why do many excellent fast-moving consumer goods companies collapse when passed to the second generation? It's because the founders were too excellent, with excellent ideas, but the company was ruled by people, relying on the personal charisma of the bosses. Borrowing lines from a Hongguo short drama: "Boss, why are your salespeople's wages so low?" "If you think it's low, you can go to another company." "Aren't you afraid of having no employees?" "I'm afraid, but I'm more afraid that management will deteriorate and can't be passed to the next generation." Boss: "You can snatch employees, but you can't snatch hearts." "SOPs must be recorded clearly one by one; whoever's project it is, they're accountable." "First establish the rules, then the road can get wider and wider." Salesperson: Boss, your wages are a bit low, but taking them doesn't burn my conscience.
In recent years, foreign companies' sales have been declining, domestic companies are having their markets snatched by white-label brands. Can your SOPs beat others who fight for the market like mad dogs? What salespeople miss isn't the old days — it's more the spirit of everyone united, pulling together as one rope for performance.
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