11 Marketing Tips I would give to my 25 year old self

Building a marketing career today is very different from when I started out in the mid‑1990s, but the fundamentals of growth haven’t changed as much as people think. In this post, I want to speak to you as if you’re my 25‑year‑old self—curious, ambitious, and a bit overwhelmed by all the noise around “AI”, “performance marketing” and “personal branding”. I’ve spent three decades working with brands like ITC, HUL, Godrej, Tata Motors, Mahindra, Amazon and many others, first in FMCG sales and then in digital and corporate training. I’ve made more mistakes than I can count, lost money in entire ventures, and also tripled my income in just a few years when I finally aligned to the right waves. What you’ll read below are 11 marketing tips - practical lessons I wish someone had pressed into my hands when I was just starting out.

1. Marketing Tip - Don’t Just Do Sales, Build a Marketing Engine

When I started my career at ITC, I spent most of my time in hardcore sales—meeting distributors, retailers, and doing trade activation. That gave me strong ground‑level understanding, but I relied solely on clients to talk about my work and never thought of marketing myself. The result was that I got slotted as “that sales trainer” and not as a broader marketing partner, which limited my opportunities. Today, I understand that sales is push, but marketing is pull: content, brand, and positioning that make the right clients come looking for you. If you’re early in your career, build both—sell actively, but also create assets (content, case studies, a portfolio) that market you without you being in the room.

2. Use Your MBA or College Network Like a Power Tool

One of my biggest under‑utilized assets has been my IIM Bangalore batch. Over 30 years, many of my classmates have become CXOs, business heads, and HR leaders who regularly buy training and digital services. For a long time, I stayed quiet on WhatsApp groups, didn’t post on LinkedIn, and assumed “people know what I do”. The truth is, most of them didn’t even know I had moved from Pune to Mumbai, forget the details of my work. Today I consciously reconnect, share what I’m building, and simply ask for introductions when it makes sense. If you treat your batch like a network of future clients and partners—not just nostalgia buddies—you’ll open doors a cold email never will.

3. Ride Tailwinds, Don’t Swim Against the River

Looking back, I now see how much easier life becomes when you align with existing momentum in the market. In 2008, I was heavily invested in a physical training center just as the recession hit corporate L&D budgets, and I was essentially trying to swim upstream; it cost me over a crore. In contrast, when I leaned into digital marketing around 2021, I stepped into a space where ad spends and client demand were already exploding. The same effort suddenly produced disproportionate results because I was riding a wave instead of fighting it. Whenever you evaluate opportunities, ask: “Where is the money already flowing in my industry, and how can I position myself there?”

4. Stick to Your Core—Don’t Chase Every Shiny Opportunity

For a few years, I tried to be a “training center + hotel booking + flight booking” business because corporate participants needed venues and travel. On paper it looked like synergy, but the reality was that I had no right to win in hospitality and travel; those were not my core competencies. When the 2008 downturn came, that over‑diversification magnified the damage and nearly broke the business. The work that consistently brings me back to stability is always my core—sales, marketing, digital, and learning design. Whenever a new opportunity appears, I now ask: “Does this use my deepest strengths, or am I just chasing revenue out of fear or FOMO?”

5. Build Your Personal Brand 10 Years Before You Think You Need It

I should have started building my online brand around 2012, when I already had strong corporate clients and rich experience in FMCG and B2B. Instead, I spent years delivering good work quietly while newer creators built massive audiences and could charge 5–10x my fees for similar value. Over the last couple of years, I’ve seen how posting consistently on LinkedIn and YouTube completely changes client perception: inbound leads increase, decision makers DM you, and pricing conversations shift in your favour. Your personal brand is not vanity; it is leverage that compounds. Start documenting your learnings and sharing them publicly long before you feel “ready”.

6. Stay Obsessively Close to the Consumer

One practice that has served me for decades is field immersion. Before running a sales program for an FMCG or pharma company, I would spend full days on the beat with reps—starting with them at the station at 9:30 am, visiting outlets, sitting in review meetings, listening to the exact language customers used. Those days gave me insights no slide deck could ever match and allowed my training to be annoyingly practical. Even today in digital, staying close to the consumer means reading comments, listening to sales calls, and tracking the actual words people use when they search. Strategy built from an air‑conditioned room without continuous customer contact is just theory with good fonts.

7. Document Everything—Turn Your Life into a Knowledge Asset

For over 15 years, I’ve maintained a “learning diary” in PowerPoint where I capture every useful concept, story, or mistake I encounter. That file has grown to more than 800 slides and acts like an external hard disk for my brain. When I revisit old slides, forgotten insights resurface and connect with current projects, often sparking new products, modules, or content ideas. Most professionals allow their best learnings to evaporate because they never capture them in one place. If you start systematically documenting now, you’ll own a personal knowledge base that compounds your expertise, creativity, and earning power over time.

8. Learn One New High‑Leverage Skill Every Six Months

For a long stretch, I kept improving as a sales trainer but didn’t add fundamentally new skills. The big income jump came when I seriously learned digital marketing—Meta ads, Google ads, funnels, analytics; my earning potential effectively tripled in three years. Constant upskilling doesn’t always mean big degrees; it can be something as focused as mastering Facebook’s Ad Library, setting up Google Business Profiles, or learning YouTube analytics. I personally read dozens of blogs each week and follow multiple newspapers to stay ahead of macro trends. If you commit to one meaningful skill every six months, five years from now you’ll be unrecognizable compared to your peers who stopped learning after their MBA.

9. Get a Mentor Who’s 5–10 Years Ahead of You

I’ve mentored many people, but I myself went without a true mentor for a large part of my corporate training journey. In hindsight, that cost me years of trial‑and‑error and probably crores in unrealized revenue. Today, in digital marketing, I consciously invest in mentors who are already running the kind of agency I want to build—people who’ve figured out pricing, hiring, systems, and client management at scale. A good mentor compresses your learning curve, helps you avoid big mistakes, and challenges your limiting stories. If Sachin Tendulkar needed Ramakant Achrekar, you and I definitely need someone ahead of us who can see our blind spots.

10. Track New Industries and Waves, Even if You’re Happy Where You Are

Even if you’re comfortably placed in FMCG or auto today, the next decade’s breakout opportunities might lie in areas like e‑commerce, quick commerce, data centers, or AI‑driven products. Zepto, Swiggy Instamart and Blinkit didn’t exist not too long ago, and today they’re creating generational wealth and some of the most interesting marketing work in the country. My own income and opportunity expanded whenever I kept an eye on emerging sectors and repositioned my skills to serve them early. Don’t cling to one industry out of habit; keep scanning the horizon and be willing to pivot before your current wave peaks.

11. Build Relationships with Multiple Stakeholders in Every Client

Early on, I would typically know just one or two people in HR within a client organization. If they moved on, my work with that client often disappeared with them. As I matured, I started deliberately building relationships across levels: HR, sales heads, marketing heads, business excellence, and even finance or procurement in some cases. Using frameworks like the Miller Heiman model, I think in terms of users, economic buyers, technical buyers, and influencers, and intentionally add value to all of them. This multi‑stakeholder relationship net gives you stability—when one person moves out, another can still champion you internally or even take you along to their next company.

If you’ve read this far, you’re already more serious about your career than most people around you. My own trajectory over the next 25 years will be guided by these same principles—doing real marketing, riding the right waves, deepening my core, and building a powerful personal brand. If you’re in your 20s or early 30s, you have an incredible head start compared to when I began. Apply even a few of these ideas consistently and your career in sales and marketing will compound in ways that will surprise you.

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Maneesh Konkar is an MBA from IIM Bangalore with over 24 years experience in sales & marketing. He runs Direction One, which is into online courses, sales & marketing training & digital marketing agency services.

Connect with him at directiononeonline7@gmail.com