Chapter 36: Chapter 36: A Difficult Team to Lead
"Besides, even if they get the commission bonus, their total income isn’t high!"
Yang Hui had run the numbers on this. At Futong Commerce, a sales associate’s compensation was a 2,200 yuan base salary plus a 5% commission.
This compensation standard had been established several years ago when the average monthly sales for a single Airex store were 300,000 yuan. Some of the better-performing stores might hit 400,000, while the worst were still pulling in over 200,000.
Based on a calculation of eight employees per store—with one store manager who didn’t make sales but received 1% of the store’s total commission—the sales associates at a high-performing store would average about 60,000 yuan in sales per month. The top seller could exceed 100,000, while the lowest would be around 40,000. As for a store with only 200,000 in monthly sales, the top seller might generate 50,000 yuan, with the lowest performer at around 20,000.
Following Futong Commerce’s compensation model, the manager of a high-performing store would earn a 3,000 yuan base salary plus 4,000 yuan in commission, totaling 7,000 yuan a month.
The top seller’s income would be around 7,200 yuan a month (a 2,200 yuan base salary plus a 5,000 yuan commission bonus), which was slightly more than the store manager. This was an attractive income.
A lower-performing employee in a good store would make 4,200 yuan a month (a 2,200 yuan base salary plus a 2,000 yuan commission bonus), which was enough to support a family.
For both managers and employees of a high-performing store, this was considered good pay in Qingzhou, leading to relatively stable staffing.
In a low-performing store, the manager’s income would be 5,000 yuan a month (a 3,000 yuan base salary plus 2,000 in commission).
The top seller would earn 4,700 yuan a month (a 2,200 yuan base salary plus a 2,500 yuan commission bonus). This was mediocre—not great, but not terrible. Finding a better-paying job elsewhere wouldn’t be a guarantee.
And the lowest-performing employee would make 3,200 yuan (a 2,200 yuan base salary plus a 1,000 yuan commission bonus). This was rather average, but since their sales were poor, finding another job would be difficult, and they likely wouldn’t earn more.
Therefore, back when the average monthly sales for a single Airex store could reach 300,000 yuan, the company’s compensation structure—including the rule that you only received a commission bonus after hitting 80% of the target—was perfectly fine. Almost every store could achieve that 80% threshold back then.
But now? Yang Hui saw that the current average monthly sales for a single Airex store had plummeted to just 150,000 yuan. Performance had been cut in half.
However, neither the big boss nor the Sales Director, President Shan, would ever accept this kind of decline in performance. They were certainly aware of the issues the sales staff reported—the so-called "unfavorable market conditions" and the brand’s "lack of product innovation"—but no one would dare voice them.
No boss would accept losses, no matter how valid the excuses.
And since they refused to accept it, they wouldn’t drastically lower the sales targets when assigning them. If they made any adjustments at all, they might lower the target from 300,000 to 250,000, and that would be considered an act of great mercy. There was no way they’d ever adjust it down to 150,000 a month.
They believed that without pressure, the frontline staff wouldn’t work hard, and performance would only get worse.
Many companies talked about ’humane corporate culture,’ but it was all just lip service. Yang Hui was discovering that private enterprises like Futong Commerce had a simple playbook: ruthless exploitation.
It wasn’t that the boss was unaware the targets were impossible to meet. He set them that way intentionally. Either you kill yourself trying to boost sales, or you don’t get paid, which saves the company on labor costs. As for wanting to quit? Go ahead. They’ll just hire a new batch of people to exploit.
The difficulty the operations team had in recruiting new people? That was the operations department’s problem. Do the job if you can. If you can’t, you’re replaceable too.
This, presumably, was Li Yang’s management philosophy: apply pressure at every level, and force results from the top down.
’He felt a bit of sympathy for these people. The work environment here was much worse than at Ruijing Commerce.’
According to Ji Kun, of the seven stores he managed, employees at six of them would only be taking home their 2,200 yuan base salary this month. After social security deductions, their take-home pay would be just over 1,000 yuan. If you lived with family in Qingzhou, it might be manageable. But for those who were renting, that wouldn’t even cover the rent.
Speaking of employee income, Ji Kun also took the opportunity to complain about his own situation, saying he’d been stuck with just his base salary for several months straight.
The supervisors’ income was also tied to the stores’ performance. Their compensation was a 5,000 yuan base salary plus 3,000 yuan in performance-based pay.
The two most heavily weighted KPIs—same-store year-over-year growth and sales target achievement—were ones they almost never scored points on. As a result, they had been earning only their base salary for months. After social security deductions, they were left with just over 4,000 yuan.
For a retail manager, earning so little was truly pathetic. Forget career advancement—you couldn’t even find a girlfriend on that salary.
Back at Ruijing Commerce, the supervisors made at least 7,000 a month.
He knew, however, that not all supervisors at Futong Commerce were in such dire straits. It was specific to the Airex supervisors, a result of the brand’s sharp market decline over the past two years. Supervisors for the company’s other brands were doing fine, with some earning 8,000 yuan or even more.
’This is a heavy burden. No wonder no one wanted to take this on before.’
’How to improve performance, how to coordinate with the shopping malls to close down the unprofitable stores, and how to increase the team’s income.’
’Especially that last one. If you can’t raise their income, why should they follow your lead?’
A leader’s job wasn’t just to give orders. If you wanted people to respect you, you had to lead by example and, more importantly, bring them tangible benefits. Having been a manager before, Yang Hui understood this very well.
Why had the supervisors at Ruijing Commerce respected him so much? Because under his leadership, the operations team earned a high income and had a relatively easy time. Whether it was an internal or external issue, if there was a problem, they knew they could go to Yang Hui and he would get it done.
Ji Kun had come ostensibly to report on his work, painting a grim picture of the frontline staff’s situation, but his primary concern was clearly his own income.
Yang Hui pulled up the data for Ji Kun’s stores. The six underperforming locations were all in either Yida Department Store or Xinyue Square.
"Xinyue Square is a shopping mall. Its performance relies on steady, daily effort, with sales spikes happening during major holiday events. So it’s difficult to see a significant boost in just the last two days of the month.
But for the three stores in Yida Department Store... I see their target achievement rates for this month are between 68% and 73%. Have you thought about any opportunities to make a push in the next two days and get those stores to 80%?
That way, you can at least ensure the employees at those stores receive their commission bonus. That will help with stability. The frontline staff are your foundation; if they’re not stable and you’re constantly replacing people, it’s impossible to improve performance!"
It takes a new employee at least a month to get up to speed with product knowledge and sales techniques. Just as they start to adapt, they realize how low the pay is and quit.
The stores keep hiring new people, who then keep leaving. Everyone is just spinning their wheels, repeating useless work. It looks like everyone is busy, but there are no results to show for it.
Therefore, Yang Hui felt the first step was to stabilize the stores’ revenue.
To stabilize store revenue, they had to hit at least 80% of the company’s target. There were two ways to achieve this.
One was to increase the numerator—that is, to raise sales performance. The other was to decrease the denominator, which would require the company to lower the sales target.
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