A brand's scale and a product's sales volume are actually determined by the overall planning before launch!
Sales Are the Source of All Enterprise Problems
Why do many business owners obsess over wealth-oriented success courses, accept the idea of shifting risks onto employees, and seek various ways to change their company's fate? Qibing judges that the vast majority of enterprises with such behavior have stagnant sales.
When sales don't improve, the corporate vision described to employees is often dismissed as "hype"; when sales don't grow, pressuring employees is often interpreted as the boss "scheming"; without market victories, frontline marketing staff lose confidence.
When a company hits a bottleneck, the owner should not pursue success courses, performance management improvements, or ways to "relax," nor use "distribution" to boost employee motivation. Instead, the focus should be on marketing breakthroughs—only marketing can solve sales problems and employee motivation.
As Su Yu emphasized in his memoirs, the most effective way to address ideological issues in the army is to win a battle; one victory resolves all ideological problems.
Some may think, "You're in marketing, so of course you say that." But that's wrong—this view comes from management guru Peter Drucker, who said that apart from marketing and innovation, everything else is a cost.
Others argue that without proper management, a growing company will decline. Drucker once noted that the biggest mistake CEOs make is treating management as the core. Indeed, management is the price of scaling up, not the root of success. In other words, scaling up requires paying the management price, but it has nothing to do with your success.
A company's success first comes from marketing, because marketing can rapidly boost sales.
For any enterprise, the root solution to all problems is sales growth. A half-year pep talk is less effective than a tangible sales increase, which immediately boosts employee confidence.
Qibing once served a company where market visits revealed shocking issues: lagging R&D, declining product quality, falling salesperson loyalty (nearly becoming industry-wide), internal management buck-passing, and severe corruption. It seemed the company couldn't survive, yet it still grew every year.
Why? Because sales grew annually. Sales growth meant distributors and salespeople earned money, the brand improved, and employees saw hope. Combined with brand and channel advantages, Qibing found the key to doubling the company's performance.
Sun Tzu said, "The skilled warrior seeks victory from strategic advantage, not from demanding people." That means a company should create its own momentum and plan its strategy, rather than relying on elite talent to generate market results.
Why can some bosses make money without exhausting employees, while others struggle to profit and leave employees running ragged? That's the difference in strategy and marketing models.
Sales Require Overall Planning
Wanglaoji achieved 17 billion yuan in annual sales with a single product, and Six Walnuts reached 3 billion yuan with one product. Why do many companies with dozens or even hundreds of SKUs only achieve tens of millions in sales? And why do some excellent products only sell a few million?
In reality, a brand's scale and a product's sales volume are decided when the product or brand is launched. Your brand name not only determines communication costs but is also the core of super cognition; your brand positioning and symbols directly determine how big your brand can become. Your product's purchase reason, channel control, and advertising creativity determine its sales volume.
So, Qibing's Art of War says: Sales are designed.
This is why Qibing's Art of War always follows the principle of "win first, then fight." This is the core idea of Sun Tzu's Art of War: you've already won before the battle begins. Why? Because before fighting, you've already assembled forces several times larger than the enemy's, just waiting to engage.
Some may question, "What about victories with fewer troops?" In fact, such cases are rare—they're the deeds of heroes, and heroes are few in this world.
For a company, when a product is developed and all strategies are planned, its future sales and growth path are already visible. In reality, many companies launch a product on a whim, push several products to market at once, and say, "If one doesn't work, another will." The result is that none succeed, and the marketing team loses confidence in the company's products.
Qibing always insists that "everything is about the brand," integrating planning and execution of brand and products. Qibing emphasizes:
- Redefine the strategic map to change the fate of low prices and low profits.
- Super brand cognition to instantly activate consumers' purchase nerves and create brand trends.
- Product development that redefines selection criteria so every product sells well.
- Product packaging design that sells as soon as it hits the shelf.
- Channel recruitment that quickly expands distribution and improves survival rates.
- Creative advertising that generates purchases upon launch.
From strategy to product, promotion, advertising creativity, and channel recruitment, Qibing completes the overall sales plan. When these are finalized at once, the product's market performance will be within expectations.
Doubling Sales Requires a Solid Foundation
Many people like "Qibing" (surprise troops), preferring to win with fewer troops and achieve maximum returns with minimal investment. But such things almost never happen, because the universal rule is that failures outnumber successes. Only when the momentum and conditions for success are met can you achieve success.
Just as victorious armies only engage after securing the momentum and conditions for victory—basically winning at the start—while losing armies rush in regardless of preparation and then try to find a way to win.
It's the same with launching a product or brand: successful companies conduct solid research, detailed planning, pilot market testing, and then large-scale launch. Companies that often fail launch first, then adjust strategies when sales are poor, and still fail.
Our "Qibing" comes from Sun Tzu's "engage with the orthodox, win with the unorthodox." Here, there are orthodox troops and surprise troops. Orthodox troops are like corporate strategy or the overall plan before product launch. "Qi" (unorthodox) in ancient times meant surplus troops; after arranging orthodox troops, the remaining forces used at critical moments are the surprise troops.
So, only after doing the foundational work can a company deploy surprise troops.
Surprise troops are not opposed to orthodox troops but interdependent. Without orthodox troops, there are no surprise troops; surprise troops always operate within the orthodox framework. That's the correct interpretation. Any company that wants to win by surprise without doing foundational work—Qibing dares not take on such clients, because without orthodox troops to pin down the enemy, surprise troops are isolated.
On Weibo, a person named Li Xiang commented on car brands: "Luxury brands are chasing Audi and BMW, but how many match Audi and BMW's seriousness? How many can get media test articles (not test drives) and official full configuration sheets on the day of a new car launch? Audi and BMW are solidly doing the 0-60 points, and they're not bad above 60 either, but followers study the above-60 stuff daily, researching endorsers and ad formats, while ignoring the most important 0-60 points."
This comment is insightful and reveals the core problem of most companies: many spend all day studying competitors, performance reviews, advertising, and how to extract money from distributors, but they don't do the 0-60 foundational work. They always think about surprise tactics to get maximum returns with minimal cost.
Little do they know that the world is fair—if you do the essential things, you'll be rewarded.
At the same time, surprise and orthodox troops are constantly changing; surprise can become orthodox, and when orthodox is perfected, any move becomes a surprise, catching the enemy off guard.
This echoes "win first, then fight."
First, do the foundational work well, and your sales and growth will increase in surprising ways.
Liu Wenxin: General Manager of Qibing Qisheng Marketing Planning Company, founder of the "Qibing Art of War" operational system, and a renowned marketing expert in China. Over a decade of marketing practice has given him rich market experience and sharp insight, enabling him to create one business miracle after another. His #Qibing Art of War# practical theory, centered on "reaching the essence, reducing costs, and every move generating sales," has been widely recognized by industry insiders and companies, bringing sales peaks to nearly a hundred enterprises.
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