---
title: "52 Sales Insights from a Marketing Veteran: A Must-Read Classic"
description: "This article shares 52 practical sales insights from a marketing veteran, covering mindset, management, sales, and communication with distributors. It emphasizes the importance of a positive attitude, effective management, and understanding the dynamics of sales and distribution."
author: "崔迎"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2014-11-13"
language: "en"
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# 52 Sales Insights from a Marketing Veteran: A Must-Read Classic

> This article shares 52 practical sales insights from a marketing veteran, covering mindset, management, sales, and communication with distributors. It emphasizes the importance of a positive attitude, effective management, and understanding the dynamics of sales and distribution.

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**Mindset -- Management -- Sales -- Communication with Distributors:**

**I. Mindset**
1. The outcome is often determined by the mindset you adopt at the start. The same applies to sales: a product's fate may be sealed before it leaves the factory, and we merely validate its positioning and the organization's promotional capability through practice.
2. Most people believe their efforts are not proportional to their rewards, for only two reasons:
   A. Your efforts did not create value for the company—your direction was wrong.
   B. The results of your efforts were not seen by others—not heard.
3. You will never fully satisfy your superior, because they always expect you to do better.
4. If you do ten things and get nine right but one wrong, people will generally remember the one wrong thing and forget the nine right ones. So don't feel wronged; it's normal.
5. Doing things for show only results in fooling yourself and perhaps your superior into a moment of joy. But afterward, you'll pay tenfold for that shared happiness—when you calculate it, it's actually most unfair to you.
6. When you think your superior is less capable than you, that's normal, because if they were more capable in your area, you wouldn't feel your own value. The reason you think this way is that you haven't seen their strengths; and the reason they are your superior is surely justified, even if for only one reason.
7. Working for money improves your family's material life; working for power gives you more autonomy and spiritual satisfaction. These aren't bad things. The real problem is when you don't know why you work at all—and many people in reality are like that.
8. In a company, three types of people should leave:
   1) Those who feel unrecognized, always thinking they are capable but not knowing how to act.
   2) Those who are busy all day without results, not knowing what they are doing.
   3) Those who talk eloquently but can't find the feeling when it comes to action.
9. To survive in a company with a happy spirit, treat colleagues as friends and partners, not enemies. The reason is simple: being with friends is pleasant, while being with enemies is annoying. Similarly, your progress often comes from conflicts with colleagues and superiors; without conflicts, there is no progress—though the conflict may stem from a specific issue or just your "comfort zone."

**II. Management:**
10. Reality is that we often fail at the simplest things. Important things are always simple, but repeating simple things in an orderly manner is actually difficult. You think it's simple because you haven't done it.
11. When you exaggerate your personal importance in a matter, the result is that your superior will trust your ability more, increase expectations, and give you harder tasks—which you may not be able to accomplish. Conversely, if you show lack of confidence and try to negotiate lower targets, your superior will likely consider assigning the task to someone else.
12. The first mistake is paying tuition to yourself; the second time you make the same mistake, you pay tuition to your superior; the third time, you don't know who gets the tuition. Yet we often repeat yesterday's mistakes.
13. The simplest yet most forgotten truth: today's problems come from yesterday's solutions. If you aren't rich today, it's because yesterday you followed a poor person's plan.
14. The main purpose of forms is not for your superior to monitor you, but for you to organize your own thoughts. Letting your superior know the real situation is far more useful than having them give blind orders based on wrong information.
15. Building a learning organization isn't about what we learn, but whether we work with a learning mindset. In practice, if you have a bias against someone, you'll rigidly reject their methods and suggestions, even if they are correct. The key is never to judge someone based on others' opinions.
16. As a superior, if you want to be relaxed, you should teach your subordinates all your knowledge and methods, then delegate and let them act. As a subordinate, if you want to be relaxed, you should tell your superior your weaknesses and shortcomings, and let them assist you.
17. As a superior, your ability is not shown in directing subordinates, but in solving any mistake they make. We often try to change a person's weaknesses, but it must be said: a person's weakness is also their strength; if the weakness is gone, the strength disappears too. So letting a person leverage their strengths is more important than overcoming weaknesses, because weaknesses are overcome by oneself, while strengths need to be found by the superior and given opportunities to shine.
18. In work, we often spend 80% of our time on things that bring 20% of the value (though cliché, it's true). For those things that require 80% of time to create 20% value, we should find them and rather not do them; we must do the important things first.
19. Generally, your superior is better at calculating than you, so bargaining will only make you admire their shrewdness more.
20. The most powerful methods are only suitable for your regional market; they won't work elsewhere. Our existence is justified by our unique regional methods; if methods were the same everywhere, our value would be lost.
21. Within the rules, the game is yours to play as you wish, but the rules are guided by your superior based on the group situation.
22. Good execution is the best way to test when you and your superior disagree and want to find out who is right. If you don't execute, you'll never know.
23. The worst is when everyone agrees in the meeting, but afterward each goes their own way. During the meeting, enthusiasm is high, but afterward, no one knows what to do. Often, half the meeting time is spent repeating yesterday's stories; the key is to form the awareness and action for the next steps.

**III. Sales:**
24. In reality, we are always doing one thing: selling what product, with whom, at what price, through which channel, to whom, and using what promotion to accelerate the process.
25. What is a brand? Books say it's a reputation formed through communication. In plain terms, it's the consumer's feeling when exposed to brand-related information, a satisfaction when in need, eventually forming a belief. In practice, it's a personality; differences are easier for consumers to remember, but the difference must be accepted by consumers.
26. Don't beg to tell consumers how much about your product, because they can't remember that much. Just give them one reason to believe and buy, and they will buy—only one. But if they don't buy, they'll give you many reasons.
27. Without concrete market or sales results, everyone's argument seems reasonable and logical. But reality is that many market outcomes don't follow your logic, so often the "therefore" is right, but the "because" is wrong.
28. In practice, you often push a product with great effort, only to find that it can't be promoted with your current resources or doesn't fit the market. This is the most tragic, but it happens often. If you start wrong, everything else is wrong. Books say the order of product-price-channel-promotion has its reasons.
29. When a new product is launched, 80% of the reason for no sales is that the price is too high, but in reality, few consumers even know our price.
30. High or low price is a relative perception; the key is to find what consumers compare it to and why they compare that way.
31. A typical special offer is to attract consumer attention and tell them "I'm cheaper," not how much cheaper. (Few consumers remember your exact price; they remember a price range.) Unless your discount drops below the consumer's perception of the entire category's price.
32. In practice, there are three types of special offers (promotions):
   1) Cheaper than before, and consumers can feel it.
   2) Cheaper than familiar products, enough to trigger impulse buying.
   3) For a special display.
   4) To tell distributors and retailers that we will run promotions.
   5) Marketing directors tell regional managers that we will run promotions.
33. Even a good product is nothing if no one sells it. Sometimes getting others to sell is more important than getting others to buy. In market reports, we often write "no market potential, special market, high price..." but in reality, our goods aren't even being sold. So first find a way to get them to sell—that's more important than anything.
34. Doing channels means making your product available in all places that can sell it, at all suitable prices, and ensuring sellers make money (to achieve their psychological balance).
35. Sales often first solve the problem of getting others to sell, then consider how to get people to buy. But in practice, "buying" and "selling" are dialectical: selling affects buying, and buying affects selling, like a rolling wheel that enters a virtuous cycle.
36. Without major promotional campaigns, display and point-of-sale shaping may be your only platform to communicate the product to consumers.
37. Promotion is a process that accelerates market operations; it's a method among methods. If a market achieves high sales without much promotion, then you are truly remarkable.
38. Promotion is not about how many tricks you have to attract consumers and channels, but whether you, at the right time, in the right place, for the right product, with the right method, through the right publicity and display, clearly convey your intended message to consumers.
39. In practice, any promotion (even the dumbest) will have an effect. The key is that the effect isn't realized because execution doesn't grasp every detail.
40. The most common mistake in designing promotions is that the designer treats themselves as the consumer, designing an activity for themselves to buy. But the problem is you may not be the target group.
41. When you can analyze a problem thoroughly from multiple angles over time, you already have the answer. In reality, 80% of decision errors come from not seeing the problem clearly or analyzing it thoroughly.
42. The only person who knows your product better than you is your competitor, but it must be noted that they may not think logically in the same way as you. So our judgments of competitor behavior are often wrong.

**IV. Communication with Distributors:**
43. If you can make money for the distributor from your product and make it not too hard, then you have conquered them.
44. When negotiating with others, the more you ask for, the more you get.
45. When a distributor gives you something, never forget there's a purpose behind it: your relationship with the distributor is just a lubricant. The most essential relationship is one of interests; feelings are built on interests. When interests are gone, feelings are gone too.
46. We and distributors are partners; they are not gods, but they care about what we can bring them. So it's more important to create value together with what we can give (company policies) that they will never be fully satisfied with. It may be tiring, but we must do it.
47. Respect your distributor as you would the God of Wealth; in a sense, they bring you fortune. But also guard against them like a thief; in reality, they are always calculating the money in your pocket.
48. Don't say "I need to ask my superior" for everything; instead, say "I should think about it," then consult your superior. Over time, if you always defer, the distributor won't talk to you because they think you have no value. However, using your superior's objection to refuse a distributor's request can be a good tactic.
49. The worst thing is to say to the distributor: "Actually, I also think the company's policy (or decision) is inappropriate." You think you're making the distributor trust you more, but in their eyes, they will doubt the company more and doubt you more.
50. Never believe a distributor's complaints: "I'm not making money." Their goal is to gain more benefits. Rest assured, if a distributor isn't making money, they won't sell your product.
51. When you don't know which negotiation technique to use, the best approach is to use none, just like describing to yourself.
52. There's no need to use company interests to buy the distributor's support or please them, because you have limited policy to begin with, and it diminishes with use. What truly sustains the relationship is the distributor's admiration for you, and the key is that it grows over time.


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