Sales Management Trainee Program(Red Star)

"Initially, I was drawn to the attractive brand and the passion among employees. Even after 17 years at Budweiser APAC, I'm still in love with this company. In this company, driving growth is beyond business growth and it is in our DNA. "

After my graduation from Fuzhou University in 2003, I joined Budweiser China BU Southeast as a Sales Management Trainee (Red Star), which is one of the best decisions I ever made. Over my 17 years, I have rotated across different functions in the organization – from supply chain to people management with increasing responsibilities. I spent most of my time in Sales and currently I'm the BU President for BU Northeast.

If you are hunger for success, you need to be strategic and practical. More importantly, seize every rotation opportunity to improve yourself. I've had good experience in both regional and headquarter roles. Though these jobs are quite different, they complement each other. For example, I used to be responsible to define the guideline for regional sales team in my headquarter role. My field experience helped me a lot in definition and execution, which eventually contribute to business growth.

"What I love about Budweiser APAC, is the company supports the growth of every individual at the pace of their own talent. The company offers a lot of opportunities and encourages employees to explore their own potential. Our greatest strength is our people and our leaders live that principle every day."

I graduated from the Dongbei University of Finance and Economics with a major in logistics and finance. Post my graduation, I joined Budweiser APAC in 2011 as a Sales Management Trainee (Red Star). In my current role at Budweiser, I work as the RTM director for Business Unit - Southeast (BUSE).

One of the challenging assignments in my role is wholesaler management. However, I also enjoy this challenge, as it ensures - I learn a lot. In this assignment, I spend a lot of time with wholesalers, understand their pain points, and try my best to solve their problems.

My team and I always faced issues with various parts of wholesaler management such as - logistics, finance, internal communication and sales capability. I, along with my team, had to quickly deep dive into these issues and then come up with a practical solution. We decided to utilize one of our key values – Teamwork. With great teamwork, we came up with a newly optimized Wholesaler Excellence Program to streamline direct supply, improve distribution models, as well as, enhance sales capabilities in a very short time.

With the optimized Wholesaler Management solution, we helped our sales and dealer partner teams achieve business objectives and design incentives keeping in mind the overall potential of this program. We saw a huge growth in partner motivation, as well as, in business results.

"Faced with a challenge, where we had to rapidly transform the ways of the team, we took strength from our core beliefs, resilience and teamwork. I think that's what helps us gain new direction always."

After graduating from the Nanjing University of Finance and Economics in 2012, I joined Budweiser (APAC) as the BU Commercial Planning and Performance Specialist. In my latest role at Budweiser, I work as the Business Unit-South (BUS) PPM Director in Guangzhou.

During my many roles, I have seen many occasions, where we faced challenges. At the beginning of 2018, entire BUS team was tested thoroughly with multiple challenges such as a plummeting market share, declining pricing of SKUs and hence, our sales and W/S teams had their confidence tested. In such a scenario, we were tasked with a unique challenge of how we reboot our growth engine, arrest the SKU pricing, and help rebuild the morale of our sales and W/S teams.

We looked inwards and decided to approach this problem with an altogether different mind-set of core beliefs, resilience and team-work. By mid-2018, our trust in our teams worked and BUS share was growing again, the pricing of SKUS was stable again and most importantly, our sales and W/S teams were back on track and had their confidence reinstated about their part in the future company story.

"Beer is an interesting business at Budweiser APAC, because a lot of great people come together to make it happen."

After graduating from Shandong University with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, I joined the Budweiser China Southeast Office as a Red Star trainee in 2013. Over the years, I have held various roles at Budweiser such as Trade Marketing Specialist in BUSE, Marketing Brand Manager-Sedrin in HQ Shanghai and now I work as an Associate Trade Marketing Director of BUSW. The common thread in all these experiences has been the strong people culture – a combination of internal support systems and helpful friends – that I have made along the way.

I benefited from this strong people culture when I worked to increase the market share for one of our prominent brands in the Guangxi market. Faced against a large local incumbent brand, we had to think beyond pricing and positioning.

We took a three-pronged approach of reaching out to our local customers and understanding their preferences, relayed that to bring in a localized marketing approach and then finally, created packaging that added to the convenience of our customers. To bring all of this together in a tight timeframe, I needed to rely on the strong ownership-driven culture present within the organization.

In 2019, when we carved inroads into the incumbent's market share and established our brand as a sizeable player, this created a strong culture of confidence among the team involved.