Make one of the top managers – the commercial director, deputy marketing or sales – responsible for managing a particular sales channel.
Assign performers - one or more, who japan phone number will implement chain management. For example, the head of the sales or marketing department, the development manager or trade marketing, etc.
Conduct a full audit of interactions with counterparties , be they dealers, corporate clients, distributors; study the actual paths by which the product reaches the buyer; identify the main players in each promotion and sales channel in the regions of interest.
Develop a strategy and tactics for managing each conducting chain. To do this, you need to create an optimal matrix of sales channels for the current moment, think through the short-term and long-term prospects.
Set precise targets for each element and the entire scheme. These could be sales volume, operating profit, breadth of product range and geographic coverage in the required regions, etc.
Make a marketing communications plan for the next six months to a year. The goal is to penetrate new promising sales channels and develop and expand existing ones.
Develop all marketing materials: from commercial proposals and product display regulations to brochures and presentations that will be required to implement the approved strategy.
Think over and implement internal regulations for employees involved in commercial business processes: for the marketing, purchasing, sales, logistics and transport departments, and the warehouse complex.
Detail the plan for implementing the management strategy for each sales channel, make it more specific and start implementing it.
Algorithm for managing the distribution channel
This is the general algorithm for forming the function of managing sales channels in an organization. Now let's move on to questions about how to influence the chain in order to identify points of influence and activities that allow implementing the strategy of managing sales highways.
Why is information about the movement of goods within the distribution network needed and how to obtain it
First, let's deal with the first part of the question: does it make sense to invest funds (and quite significant ones) in order to obtain this information? Let's explain step by step.
Let's start with the first part of the question - why spend often considerable funds to obtain this information. And let's immediately look at an example.
Imagine that there is a certain brand Mustang, which produces photographic equipment, and its exclusive dealer in Russia is OOO Digishen (all names are fictitious). The distributor initially relied on cooperation with any intermediaries who wanted to purchase Mustang equipment, and did not form a special network for this brand (since its buyers were mainly regular customers of the manufacturer itself). Digishen's client base was 70% wholesale and retail or wholesale firms. A year later, it turned out that 2.5 times less Mustang products were sold than planned, and the intermediary was threatened with termination of the exclusive distribution agreement with Mustang.
The management decided to develop sales of Mustang photo equipment as part of a separate corporate project. The first difficulty that the new project manager had to overcome was the impossibility of tracking where wholesalers were selling gadgets and building a map of the coverage of the subjects of the Russian Federation. The traces of these goods were simply lost in the vast expanses of the country, and wholesalers were in no hurry to share information about the movement of products.
The project manager decided to conduct a study of the wholesale distribution channel according to the following scheme:
select the most priority regions;
identify the largest players in the retail segment of each territory;
collect information about the entire range of photographic equipment that each of them sells (including Mustang brand devices);
If the company sells products from this manufacturer, find out who it purchases them from.
The result was establishing contacts with those stores that already had Mustang equipment on their shelves. Digeshen began to cooperate with them directly, bypassing wholesale resellers. This made it possible to significantly expand the product range and give retail companies very favorable conditions that previous dealers would never have agreed to. Those organizations that did not sell Mustang products were also sent commercial proposals, after analyzing their product range policy. A year of this project brought a more than fivefold increase in sales of the brand, and Digeshen retained the status of exclusive distributor of the brand.