Chapter 47: The Iron Army of Ground Promotion

Gu Cheng's execution was truly remarkable. Ever since he decided to implement the "Legend must launch an internet café owner proxy recharge system" as a core operational strategy, the company's focus shifted immediately. The development team, aside from maintaining essential staff for bug fixes and redundant data optimization, allocated every available coder to the new recharge system.

Online gaming companies already possessed a backend for recharge, billing, and timing systems, so developing a remote payment tool wasn't entirely out of their scope. Supplementing the development staff was necessary, and Cherry helped oversee recruitment, successfully finding several capable talents.

As for the payment security verification module, its importance could not be overstated. Gu Cheng had to hire people from antivirus software companies or other cybersecurity expert groups. Thinking it over, he recruited Chen Shoufu, whom he met in the capital, with a generous salary. Together with Cherry, he persistently called and persuaded Wen Huiying to join the project—Gu Cheng even advanced her twenty thousand upfront to ease her worries about supporting her family while working abroad.

The duo collaborated to produce the online payment security plugin for Legend Entertainment. The new recharge system was expected to launch a beta version by the end of November.

With this reliable safeguard, Gu Cheng personally led a team, including Gan Jiawei and several newly recruited ground promotion staff, to pilot their outreach efforts in Qiantang and neighboring cities, recruiting internet café owners into their "strategic alliance."

Once Gu Cheng developed an effective set of promotional pitches and methods, he planned to call Ma Feng and borrow Ali's ground promotion network, switching the idle e-commerce outreach teams, now languishing in the winter, into temporary internet café promoters.

...

By late October in Qiantang, the weather had already turned chilly.

Having just joined a week ago, Gan Jiawei was personally led by Gu Cheng, canvassing major internet cafés in the nearby city of Gusu. To test the abilities of Gan Jiawei and the other new sales recruits, Gu Cheng deliberately chose cities that hadn't been targeted in the early internal beta, to see how well they performed in uncharted markets.

Each person was assigned a city, visiting internet cafés one by one. For two days, the boss supervised their progress personally; the rest of the time, they worked solo, reporting their results on weekends.

After a month, the company would decide, based on everyone’s performance, who would be promoted to supervisor or manager, who would receive the most lucrative market segments, and who would be entrusted with managing more of Ali's borrowed outreach resources.

The salespeople, invigorated as if injected with adrenaline, aggressively pursued business.

Gan Jiawei cherished the opportunity of having the boss personally "supervise" his work, pulling out all the stops. He felt energized—after twelve years selling fuel cards for China Petroleum, he’d never worked so hard as he did today.

Gu Cheng, not yet eighteen and unable to obtain a driver's license, traveled around the city with his team on electric scooters.

At nine in the morning, two scooters stopped in front of a large chain internet café in the northern part of Gusu. Despite their haste, they locked their bikes with heavy steel chains, as bike theft was rampant in these times.

Mornings were slow business hours for internet cafés, leaving owners more available for business discussions. Gan Jiawei had studied late into the night, knowing this owner operated four chain cafés in nearby neighborhoods, each with over two hundred machines—he was a key target for today.

"Is the boss in?" Gan Jiawei asked with a broad smile as he entered.

"ID card," the network administrator replied, expressionless.

Gan Jiawei explained, "I'm not here to use the internet. Is your boss available?"

The admin looked at him suspiciously. "What’s your business with him? The boss hasn't arrived yet."

Gan Jiawei, still smiling, slipped the admin a pack of seven-yuan cheap cigarettes, delivering his prepared pitch. After twelve years selling fuel cards, his eloquence was well-honed.

It took fifteen minutes before the admin summoned the boss. Gan Jiawei immediately launched into his full pitch, laying out the benefits of joining the Legend proxy recharge system.

"These game cards will sell for thirty yuan apiece after New Year’s Day next year. Usually, the channel price for magazine distributors is twenty-five yuan—a five-yuan margin split among all levels from top distributors down to newspaper stand vendors. If you join this proxy recharge system, players in your café can recharge directly from you. We’re ‘manufacturer direct sales,’ offering you the cards at twenty-five yuan each, so you earn five yuan per recharge."

"Worried you can’t sell them? No problem! We offer every new member café a three hundred yuan presale credit. If business isn’t good, you can withdraw. If you sell out the three hundred yuan quickly and want more, simply clear the credit and purchase again."

"Payment method? Absolutely convenient! We’re developing an online electronic payment system tied to fixed IP and MAC addresses, so you can transfer funds directly online, with guaranteed security."

"Afraid of bank regulation? No, no, no—ours isn’t like those fly-by-night electronic payment schemes. Technically, ours is a ‘merchant prepaid membership card,’ not a financial tool for third-party payments, so the banking regulator doesn’t oversee it—it’s perfectly legal. Think about it: your café also offers membership cards—‘temporary access four yuan per hour, recharge one hundred for three yuan per hour.’ The regulator doesn’t care, right? Ours is the same."

Gan Jiawei methodically addressed the café owner’s concerns, skillfully pacing the conversation and employing subtle psychological tactics.

After nearly an hour, all four chain cafés were signed.

Six hundred yuan commission in hand—equivalent to a month’s base salary.

Gan Jiawei felt utterly invigorated; this wolfish private enterprise was exhilarating. As long as you had capability and thick skin, piles of cash awaited.

After a morning’s work: five clients approached, four deals closed, seven cafés, totaling one thousand and fifty yuan in income—the first big client aside, the rest were smaller, single-location owners.

In truth, the net profit wasn’t quite as high, since Legend Entertainment’s sales management was loose, with no "entertainment budget." Gifts like cigarettes and liquor to build rapport came out of Gan Jiawei’s own pocket, and many travel expenses weren’t reimbursed.

Still, the earnings were considerable. Strong salespeople might spend forty percent of their income on marketing, but still net sixty percent, making thirty thousand a month entirely possible.

Such a salary was high indeed for the year two thousand.

...

Driven by the promise of money, Gan Jiawei didn’t even eat, solving lunch by munching bread on the go with Gu Cheng.

After finishing his bread, Gan Jiawei wiped his mouth and immediately started on the first client of the afternoon.

But after entering and chatting for a bit, he encountered the exact same situation as the morning’s failed attempt: this café owner was just too old-fashioned, utterly distrustful of the idea of "paying via computer." Despite Gan Jiawei's efforts, he couldn’t seal the deal and had to move on.

He didn’t dwell on it, heading straight to the next target.

"Hold on!" Gu Cheng called out as Gan Jiawei was about to start his scooter.

"Mr. Gu, what’s up?"

Gu Cheng frowned. "Are you just going to keep casting your net and moving on to the next client?"

Gan Jiawei paused, defending, "This boss is too old-school—convincing him would take as much time as landing three other clients."

Indeed, when opening up a blank market, the most "efficient" method was to quickly mark territory, targeting easy, high-quality clients and leaving the tough ones behind.

But this approach was detrimental to deep market cultivation. Eventually, it led salespeople to cherry-pick markets, treating each deal as a one-off, devoid of belonging or responsibility.

"Lao Gan, I’m not saying you’re wrong—when working alone, quickly grabbing clients like this is fine. But if you lead a team in the future, can you guarantee your team members have your eloquence and drive? If everyone just picks the easy targets, after two or three months, all the soft targets are gone—how will you dig deeper into the market segments? Go back and re-sweep the tough clients? I don’t see how your current workflow can be taught to other outreach teams."

Gan Jiawei blushed, thinking for a moment. "At first, you only said to assess how many new clients each person signed—you didn’t mention client quality and market segment coverage..."

"Then let’s say I was wrong. If I now decide to assess your ‘coverage rate of the markets you’ve already swept,’ what would you do? And I want not just results, but a replicable process that others can learn."

Gan Jiawei considered for a long while, then gritted his teeth and said, "Alright, watch me. This afternoon, I’ll focus on just two streets—I guarantee to sign every legitimate café on those streets!"

"Good, you’re the first to make such a bold claim—if you really pull it off, once Ali’s outreach team is rented next month, the management’s yours!" Gu Cheng was decisive, immediately offering a reward.

He wanted to use this sudden new assessment criterion to test Gan Jiawei’s real capabilities—whether he had what it took, years later, to help Meituan carve a path in the O2O bloodbath.

Gan Jiawei turned his scooter around, skipping the cafés, and headed first to a tobacco shop, buying two packs of hard Zhonghua and one Jinling.

His morning earnings of a thousand yuan were completely spent.

Then he rode straight to a police station in the northern district.

Gu Cheng followed, observing coldly. Gan Jiawei entered and asked the patrolling officer, "Hello, comrade, who here oversees internet café operations?"

The officer regarded him warily. "What’s your business? This isn’t a place for random inquiries."

Gan Jiawei gritted his teeth. "My child’s been sneaking into illegal cafés—I want to report them for unlawfully allowing minors online!"

The officer’s expression soured, but reluctantly led Gan Jiawei inside to meet a deputy section chief.

Gu Cheng didn’t go in—he didn’t have the salesman’s thick skin to pretend to be a wayward youth’s father.

The officer, leading the way, thought, "Hmph, doesn’t he know all the café owners here pay protection fees? Coming to report—how naïve!"

What he didn’t know was that as soon as he left Gan Jiawei alone, Gan Jiawei switched to a different smile.

Over half an hour later, Gan Jiawei emerged, trailed from afar by a plainclothes officer.

Gan Jiawei watched the officer leave, then explained quietly to Gu Cheng, "Section Chief Yang oversees inspections for minors in cafés—the local owners all respect him."

Gu Cheng remained impassive, following Gan Jiawei for the rest of the afternoon.

Indeed, most of the afternoon was spent in the police stations of the two chosen streets. Time spent in the actual cafés was much less than in the morning.

The café owners were all open to trying this new business that didn’t require upfront payment.

Though the afternoon’s negotiation costs were much higher than in the morning, Gan Jiawei’s results surpassed those earlier efforts. At this rate, one outreach worker could sweep an entire district in a week.

It seemed that skills truly had no moral alignment—even the most unsavory abilities, such as adeptness in dealing with authorities, could serve a righteous cause if used well.

Gu Cheng thought it over and asked one last question: "Are you sure others can learn this method?"

"I guarantee I can teach them! And the Ali outreach team probably has local connections too."

"Alright, then here’s your chance—we’ll divide several market segments, and everyone can compete for the position based on performance."