The next day, under clear skies, Gu Yun brought his assistant He Xuan to the Ele.me Jiangcheng branch and received a warm welcome from the regional head.
It is impossible for anyone in Jiangcheng, the thoroughfare of nine provinces, not to have heard of the famous name of Paradise Group.
Sun Jiajun poured two cups of tea with his own hands and chatted with Gu Yun about home affairs.
Sun Jiajun is a fresh graduate who just graduated last year. As soon as she graduated, she joined the sales team of Ele.me early and has now grown into a city manager in Hubei Province.
In just over a year, she was responsible for the sales and promotion of Beijing Shangdi Software Park and Zhongguancun, and established the Jiangcheng branch.
As Ele.me received angel investment and started its urban strategy, the number of people under her management also increased from one person to more than 20 people.
Normally, Sun Jiajun's day starts by handing out flyers outside subway stations and in crowded places.
This habit started from the entrepreneurial idea of Chen Qiang, the sales director of Ele.me.
Chen Qiang also started his own business in college. He opened a restaurant and built his own food ordering website.
In the early days, he did some promotion of his own website on Renren and Tieba, but the results were minimal.
After that, he printed some flyers on ordinary A4 paper and started distributing them in schools and dormitories. Soon, dozens of orders came in.
The entrepreneurial experience in these universities made him believe more in the power of traditional flyers, and he has continued this habit into the promotion of Ele.me.
Generally, the white-collar area starts work at nine o'clock, and Sun Jiajun and other sales staff will arrive at 7:30 to hand out leaflets at subway stations and places with the highest concentration of white-collar workers.
"After 9:30 is the cleaning time for office buildings like the Paradise Building. Between 10:30 and 11:00 is the peak time for restaurant orders."
Sun Jiajun herself was born in Jiechu, and she knew these details very well. She had a good impression of the Paradise Group, so she took Gu Yun to introduce them.
After all, she can single-handedly build a team in Jiangcheng and become the head of a region at a young age. Her work ability and social experience are certainly not bad. When the boss of Paradise Group comes to visit, she has a different feeling in her heart.
Interpretation.
I have more friends and more paths. It’s hard to work in any industry now. If you build a good relationship with such a big boss and leave a good impression, you might have the opportunity to work in other industries in the future?
"Then the question is, do you usually order a lot of food in the park building?"
Gu Yun spent most of the time listening to the other party, smiling and taking a sip of tea, and occasionally asked questions.
"Mr. Gu, judging from the data, the order volume of the Paradise Group has indeed been increasing since the beginning of the year."
After Sun Jiajun answered, Gu Yun turned to look at He Xuan, who was silent next to him.
"What do you think this means?"
"Explain, the canteen chef's professional capabilities still need to be strengthened?"
He Xuan thought for a few seconds. In the Paradise Building, ready-made meals are prepared for everyone for lunch and dinner, and the chef in charge of cooking in the canteen is also paid a high salary. Why are there still people ordering takeout?
“The layout is still small.”
Gu Yun put the Pu'er tea in his hand back on the table, pointed to He Xuan's strategic map of Ele.me's office and said.
"Have you noticed, ordering takeout is now a necessity. It doesn't mean that we have prepared delicious meals for our employees and they will follow everyone to eat. There will always be someone who chooses to open the takeout app."
…
“People are different. Some people’s habit at work is to finish their work before going to eat. Some people don’t like to eat with others. Some people value freshness and are unwilling to eat similar cuisines every day.
, facing the same partners.”
"Ele.me solves this problem. It is a brand new way of life. It is not simply due to the poor quality of our chefs and the poor cooking quality."
"Even if we invite chefs for state banquets, there will still be people who don't want to eat in the canteen."
Sun Jiajun obviously agreed with Gu Yun's remarks. She nodded, her smart and capable short and medium hair flowing slightly.
"Mr. Gu is right. In data analysis, we basically do not consider whether users choose to order takeout, because almost all data tells us that after user habits are established, there will be positive growth."
After expanding the territory and establishing the habit of ordering food among users, the next steps are actually not particularly complicated.
On weekdays, the restaurants in the area she is responsible for occasionally encounter some minor technical problems on the client side, and Sun Jiajun usually assists in handling restaurant feedback.
The afternoon is spent on developing and maintaining the restaurant, and the evening is spent uploading images of the restaurant’s dishes and arranging plans for the next day.
In the middle of this year, Sun Jiajun came to Jiangcheng for the first time.
During this period, it was also the time when Ele.me decided to expand rapidly across the country at its headquarters in Shanghai.
At an executive meeting in mid-June, founder Zhang Xuhao proposed rapid expansion and reaching 200 cities by the end of the year.
"Mr. Gu, in the first week we came here, five colleagues were crowded into a room with only two beds. On average, each person slept less than three hours a day. This went on for a while. To be honest, I was so busy that I forgot about it.
Got to rent a house.”
Sun Jiajun recalled her hardworking years, and she felt a little emotional as she had just graduated.
"When I graduated, many classmates actually chose to go south and come to Jiangcheng to participate in the campus recruitment of the Paradise Group. I was preparing to take the postgraduate entrance examination but missed it, and ultimately failed, so I chose to join the start-up team Ele.me."
Everyone knows that you have to work hard behind the scenes to look effortless.
"So, you just settled in the capital, and you chose to come to Jiangcheng to expand the market?"
Gu Yun looked at Sun Jiajun in front of him meaningfully, and suddenly felt that this girl was very interesting.
"Yes, many of my classmates work in the Paradise Group, so I feel that opening up the market here is both a challenge and an opportunity for me."
The meaning behind her move is self-evident.
When everyone thought that joining big companies like Paradise Group, Alibaba, and Penguin would have a future, she wanted to tell future generations which of the two paths was better by proving herself in a start-up team.
When Sun Jiajun came to Jiangcheng to work hard, he found that the attitude of restaurants towards new things was very different from that in Beijing. In just two days, fifty new restaurants had joined.
As early as a few months ago, when Sun Jiajun led another colleague to explore the Beijing market, the initial restaurants were only set up in restaurants near the university town.
At that time, I almost begged merchants to cooperate. When local merchants heard about online ordering, they thought it was a scammer.
…
Don’t even expect merchants to use “online payment” to let money pass through the platform.
Even if you hand out flyers in a restaurant, you will be kicked out at any time by the bad-tempered boss.
It wasn't until some enthusiasts came forward and cooperated with the new platform for a month or two that merchants began to trust the marketing managers and found that opening a takeout business would be better, and they slowly began to accept this form.
Most of the owners of restaurants near universities know each other, and some are even from the same hometown.
When restaurants are closed for the summer vacation, word of mouth gradually begins to spread among each other.
"A platform called Ele.me gave us business, and we only did it for a month. The business is getting better and better, and now it even actively gives us subsidies."
After the middle of the year, Sun Jiajun was transferred to the Jiangcheng market to develop white-collar areas that he had never set foot in before.
She found that Jiangcheng, especially the restaurant owners near the Paradise Group, seemed to be very receptive to new things, and it was not difficult to talk about them at all.
"For example, there are 150 restaurants near Optics Valley Software Park, and now it is estimated that there are 100 restaurants that accept takeout delivery. In those days, we started to pick up restaurants all the time."
"This is actually relatively normal. You may not know what the Optics Valley Software Park was like two years ago. These bosses dared to make bets and came to invest in opening restaurants and restaurants. They have a deep understanding of the social trends and economic situation.
"
This is Gu Yun’s analysis of the reasons why the restaurants that cooperate with Ele.me have skyrocketed since arriving in Jiangcheng.
They were able to invest in Optics Valley Software Park when it was still a deserted land. I am afraid these bosses are the most willing to accept new things in Jiangcheng.
Not to mention picking up a food delivery app, even posting and promoting on Dou Le, this is already a skill that has been learned by everyone.
Jiang Cheng's work is full of miracles. Although it was difficult to open up the market in the early stage, when Sun Jiajun went to the restaurant she had cooperated with in the past again, she found that the restaurant's attitude had gradually changed.
"After those bosses get the business, they almost worship us. Sometimes they even ask if they want to come over for lunch."
"Indeed, are you hungry? You are quite different in this regard, very courageous."
Halfway through the chat with the regional manager, Gu Yun had a new understanding of Ele.me’s structure.
As a big boss, it is impossible for him to go to Shanghai to discuss buying shares with the founder of Ele.me without knowing anything.
From the communication, Gu Yun saw that Ele.me gave front-line marketing personnel, that is, the regional managers of each region, very high authority, including expense allocation, back-end operations, etc.
As a college student entrepreneurial team, most of the top leaders decentralize management. Anyway, they give you a goal and a budget framework, and you can do whatever you want. If it doesn't work, you will be moved to another area and you won't leave.
To put it bluntly, no one is more authoritative than anyone else, and no one’s advice is necessarily right. Everyone should try it themselves and judge based on the actual results.
Under this guiding ideology, the entire Ele.me team has produced various magical talents.
According to Sun Jiajun, for example, Ele.me’s previous top sales was initially the regional director of Hucheng University.
He is a strange person. When he was working at Ele.me, he seemed to be carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
His legendary experience is that it took him only one month to achieve the annual goal of almost a year in this area with one activity.
…
At that time, I spent several months' budget on organizing activities, and that's not all, I also put money into it myself.
"Awesome."
With such a gambling habit, Gu Yun can probably understand why he incurred gambling debts.
However, management methods like Ele.me are actually not entirely a good thing.
As a leader, you must first have this measure, and giving too much power to the lower levels is a double-edged sword in itself.
In a highly free and unrestrained development model, it will not be rare in the future for Ele.me’s market managers to extort merchants and use their power to collect small amounts of cash.
In short, the decision between authorizing or withdrawing power needs to be controlled by the upper management.
But in any case, it is such wildness that allowed Ele.me, as a grassroots team, to successfully survive the barbaric growth period.
"Manager Sun, do you have any tips for local promotion? I have distributed leaflets before, but I always feel that distributing leaflets is very inefficient in promotion, and it can even be said to have no effect."
The topics the group chatted about were wild and imaginative, and even He Xuan expressed her own opinions.
In her eyes, what makes Ele.me even more awesome is its unique local promotion model.
When He Xuan first followed Gu Yun, Xiaole's learning was still in its infancy. How to make her first pot of gold was the first task Gu Yun assigned her. Her first step into society was to push.
send flyer.
In fact, compared with the later information flow advertising, thousands of people, thousands of faces, algorithms, and the efficiency of local promotion compared with advanced high technology, it is just like a child holding his head high and trying to compare his height with an adult.
The core of Ele.me’s local promotion is not clumsy manual propaganda, but highly data-based.
"We completed the internal data platform around the beginning of 2012, which is basically based on buildings. With this information, we can actually estimate how many buildings there are in total. With the marketing manager in charge on the ground, it is even more accurate.
How many rooms are there in the building and how many people are in each room?"
As an expert, Sun Jiajun explained with a smile, dispelling He Xuan's doubts about Ditui.
In this case, not only can it be accurately estimated how many flyers each marketing manager needs to send out for each wave of promotion, but it can also clearly show the efficiency of each marketing manager, the effectiveness of each building, etc.
Then we can discuss it with everyone at the team's weekly meeting, treat illnesses when they are sick, and strengthen their health when they are not.
"Can it still be like this? Can we still play like this on ground push? Then we can too."
He Xuan originally thought that her company's advanced management ideas were the most advanced in all walks of life, but she didn't expect that there were mountains beyond the mountains, and her eyes suddenly widened.
"No, only the food delivery industry can do this. We actually can't do it."
Gu Yun shook his head and interrupted He Xuan.
Ele.me's local promotion method is absolutely unique, because this is only possible in the field of food delivery.
Just imagine in other fields, what kind of consumption has such strong regional restrictions?
What kind of consumption can distribute leaflets in the morning and see results at noon?
What kind of consumption can be compared horizontally regardless of group of people?
Only dining!
It is precisely because of this high degree of data that regional managers can sit in their offices and come up with marketing plan ideas for the whole country.
The reason is very simple, one thing tells everything.
"Mr. Gu, we have been chatting for so long, and I still don't know why you are here this time."
After finishing the small talk, Sun Jiajun finally couldn't help but ask questions.
"I plan to invest in Eleh, can you build a bridge and have a chat with Mr. Zhang?"
