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They also eat the rice of youth. Mid-level marketing supervisors in SMEs form a vast group. In a sense, they directly influence the future of China's SMEs.
This group has the following distinct characteristics:
Regardless of educational background, they are basically experience-based. They mostly climbed to their current positions through hands-on combat. Therefore, their individual combat capability is strong, their ability to manage customers and markets is strong, and their ability to guarantee sales performance in local markets is also strong. From this perspective, their practical capabilities are overall higher than those of mid-level marketing supervisors in large enterprises. The latter would be almost helpless without strong marketing logistical support.
Most are sales-oriented, with relatively weak marketing planning capabilities. Their "marketing planning" is more reflected in the formulation of sales policies. When you open their "marketing plans," what you see mainly are promotional plans.
Strong learning and imitation abilities. As long as the enterprise's production and technology can support them, they will help the company quickly follow up on the innovative actions of industry leaders or similar competitors.
Obvious defects in marketing thinking. For example, they often treat price as a strategy, that is, using price to sell products, rather than shaping a stable price for the product. Therefore, the prices of SMEs often have uncertainty.
Another example: they pay more attention to short-term performance. The performance of SMEs depends more on manpower than on systems, so their income and positions are often constrained by short-term performance rather than long-term performance. Over time, in their "marketing thinking," strategic factors are almost completely destroyed. As a result, the product life cycle of SMEs is generally short, and markets shift periodically.
- The uncertainty of SME development leads to narrow promotion paths. They lack long-term career planning, and their loyalty to the company cannot be transformed into a sense of belonging.
So, what will their future look like?
- Job hopping: By changing jobs, they extend their career life cycle or seek better positions and treatment. But as age increases and the market environment changes, there will come a day when you can no longer jump.
- Career change: For example, choosing a riskier path like entrepreneurship, or other professions that are not optimistic either.
- Being eliminated: They often lament—marketing eats the rice of youth.
In essence, on the one hand, how to maximize the extension of the career life cycle, and on the other hand, how to accumulate conditions for the inevitable need to find another way out in the future, becomes a major issue that mid-level marketing supervisors must plan for.
Several practices that affect the second half of your life Management practice Not to mention marketing supervisors, all marketing people are born managers. Customers, products, markets, personal actions, prices, expenses, budgets, and sales all need management.
The problem is that in daily work, marketing personnel rarely engage in these management tasks seriously. They do not realize how much contribution strengthening these management practices would make to themselves.
Of course, mid-level marketing supervisors also have the responsibility of team management. If you can manage customers and salespeople well, what people and what matters can you not manage well?
Planning practice Like management, marketing personnel are born planners.
Current marketing personnel do not do planning, but they lack systematic, professional, and standardized marketing planning.
You must seriously study competition, demand, channels, marketing environment, and market development trends. At the very least, you should study these within "your sphere of influence" and submit your own marketing plan.
For senior marketing executives, not planning the whole means not planning the part; but for mid-level marketing supervisors, not planning the part means not planning the whole.
A person who can engage in marketing planning will have no problem with planning and strategizing for other tasks of the enterprise.
Business practice From developing markets to managing markets, and then to operating markets, this is the three-step progression for marketing personnel. The biggest possibility for marketing personnel is to go from developing and managing markets to being market-for-market's sake. This is also the root of the frequent contradictions between marketing and business.
Just as the purpose of a company making products is to sell, the purpose of a company operating in the market is to make a profit. Even achieving good sales performance is not the ultimate goal; only generating satisfactory profits is the ultimate goal.
Where do satisfactory profits come from? They come from operating the market.
Similarly, a person who knows how to operate the market possesses the basic qualities to operate a company.
Mindset practice Engaging in the marketing profession, at the very least, you should acquire these basic concepts or understandings.
For example:
Opportunity awareness. Without opportunities, there is no marketing. Marketing starts with discovering opportunities and ends with seizing them.
The awareness of "helping others to achieve oneself." Marketing is a job where only by making others satisfied can you be satisfied. Only by considering your own interests from others' perspectives and realizing your interests on the premise of letting others gain interests can there be marketing. Win-win and multi-win should not just be slogans but should be practiced.
Overall awareness. All marketing people have this lament: Why is it that only marketing personnel are doing marketing in the enterprise? Why can't the enterprise form a fist and jointly serve the market or customers? They haven't thought about the opposite question: Have the marketing department and other internal departments fully communicated and cooperated sincerely?
Not only that, even within the marketing system, marketing personnel are more like "lone rangers." They are more familiar with the outside than the inside, like the Diaoyu Islands "isolated overseas." Isn't the problem obvious?
It is said that marketing is the dragon head, but the dragon head must drive the dragon body.
- Strategic awareness. Marketing is the work of maximizing short-term performance, and at the same time, it is the work of creating the greatest possibility for achieving long-term performance. The former is tactics, the latter is strategy. In a sense, without strategic awareness and strategic behavior, there is no marketing, only sales. And sales can only achieve today, while strategy can achieve the future.
If marketing personnel have a broader vision, they will have unlimited career possibilities. Being confined to sales work is definitely drawing a circle to imprison yourself. Because, from a career perspective, sales work is only the entry or foundation of marketing. And mid-level marketing supervisors in SMEs are precisely strong in sales and trapped by sales.
I am very sad to see that a group of elites I trained in the 1990s, who are now senior marketing executives, are still confined to the sales level. Their positions have become higher, but their personal performance has become mediocre.
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