Sales channels to reach your customers
Selling through retailers, wholesalers and other distributors
Selling through an intermediary may be a more cost-effective way of reaching your end-customers than selling to them directly.
If you are targeting business customers who prefer to deal with large suppliers, selling directly to them may not be a realistic option. Instead, you might aim to supply wholesalers who have existing relationships with those businesses.
If individual consumers buy low value quantities of your products, the best option might be to target retailers that sell similar products. Or you might choose to focus your efforts on a relatively small number of wholesalers who can in turn supply your products to many retailers.
Other distribution channels may also reach your end-customers. For example, technology suppliers often sell to resellers who can configure and install the technology to suit end-users’ particular needs.
Managing your distributors
You need distributors who will value your product. If they sell competing products, what will make them push yours?
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Think about how you set your prices. Distributors will be more enthusiastic if they can make a large profit – but setting too low a price will eat into your own margins.
Effective advertising and promotions can be vital. As well as marketing to the distributor, you can promote your products directly to end-customers. Distributors will be keener to stock and sell products that their customers are asking for.
The key terms of the supply relationship should be covered in a written contract. Key issues might include:
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how much stock the distributor will hold
what the distributor will do to promote your products
how quickly you can resupply and minimum order levels
whether the distributor has exclusive rights to your product (for example, in a particular territory)
what happens if either you or the distributor want to end the relationship
Business ideas, Marketing and sales , promotions and advertising ideas , articles
ROLE of IT in FMCG Organization
Just think of a situation: “Delivery of right stock to wholesaler/ distributor once/ twice a week”Lets not go into National level delivery and try our hands with State first. Lets take Uttar Pradesh with number of Wholesalers/ Distributors (WDs)We all know that India market in general is heterogenous and also the states. Even a city like Lucknow will have diverse people with different disposable incomes, lifestyles etc. Lets divide into Lucknow city into different small markets. Some market will smoke Wills Classic and others are extremely loyal to CAPSTON.So its not toy handling to first of all estimate the demand for different regions. Lets assume even if you the right estimates for all markets for the next month (which actually is idealistic), how will you decide how much to deliver to different WDs every next few days. Lets go to some basics:1. WD has a constraint of stock capacity which make him impossible to stock for the whole month, also it may lead to expiry of the products.2. WD dont have the financial capacity to buy stock for a month, which make him appropriate to stock for few days.SO there are huge calcuations required to come up with a DELIVERY SCHEDULE for a particular month. Here comes the ROLE OF IT – Information Technology. ITC has done it right by implementing SAP R/3. Let me mention few of its benefits:Provide real time Stock on HandBrand wise pipeline is maintained Analyze the data to get the trends in the sales and other variables Now think of a situation 5 years back when there was no IT and all this written above was done manually, must have been a nightmare for all these guys to come up with right Deliveries to the WDs. But i must mention here one thing that FMCG companeis have still not fully leveraged IT to futher benefit in terms of operational efficiencies. There is a huge scope left. Do you guys have ideas?
