Reality Checks

Stage -1 :Story of a Sales Trainee:

To get a decent job is the dream of every parent (may not be that of the child but…)
But to figure out the best balance between Choice and Availability rests upon us. So here I am joined a Sales & Marketing job (in contrast to cozy IT job which my Pre –MBA IT work-ex supports) to enrich my learnings or as they say broaden my horizons. Whether there was something good or something stupid in him is still in question?

Continuing further, we all management trainees boarded a fully paid flight to land up in plush 5-Star hotel for our induction process with the pickup-drops sometimes in a Merc. Wow, what a start. Family must be proud to know his son relaxing his muscles at the Spa and Jacuzzi and eating almost all types of food available on earth. So the formal introduction sessions started with each division head of the company coming and pitching his division’s achievements and future growth. It just reminded me be back to the b-school days where every prof coming forward and telling about his electives. But quite surprisingly some of the us retained their habit of Class Participation and After Class Participation (CP and ACPs ) here also. Finding the centers of power, pitching them as the best trainee of the year and future leaders of the company, influencing these ‘grey coloured’ professionals with their best possible Kotler gyan.

The best piece of ‘networking’ was visible in the night parties where almost every top person comes. So the next task was to impressing them with the “so vast marketing and finance insights” some how gathered in between bunking and attending some of the minimum required classes at the college. Thus finding the short cut way to success was fully visible. The best part was to see that bunch of “Future leaders” wandering from one top person to the other just trying to find out who can be their most powerful God Father in the company.

Away from all this hustle, I was sitting on a remote chair, but it was real fun to watch people moving around here and there. But somewhere I start thinking as to when we are working for the same company and fighting the same competitors so shouldn’t we collaborate than compete? Ok, I agree there is only one CEO chair but still why even some companies promote this culture of competing among employees or even management trainees. Anyways, lost in the lots of power games and networking activities (which even beat the Congressmen for Sonia Gandhi). I tried to find some sanity and started locating people with similar mindset. So how should I go about to find my Target Segment? Well it was not very hard to do as a few of them sharing the remote chairs were also laughing at the same drama happening in the system. So from next day onwards we made a point to sit together at the last row, away from all the CP enthusiast and future CEOs and the days started passing with much less torture with sessions in the morning and swimming/Spa/Party in evenings.

Just to mention more about the of the parties, it contained not only the top shots of the company but also every top label in liquor, be it the top scotch or Rs 40k priced Red and White French wines. So, come to the party, see the bunch’s new tricks, savour some new brand and esp the costlier ones and enjoy the tipsy stage.

Then one day we were conveyed that The Lord of the company, The Company CEO is visiting here so he will be spending hour an hour with us. There were strict instructions of limiting our interactions to that time limit only as he is a very busy man. Of course who can be as free as us who were doing just sit and attend the presentations. But as they say ‘old habits die hard’ and especially when the Supreme commander is there, so CPs were on full tone as if they will grab the director’s chair in the company on that CP note. That ½ hour was just casually stretched to One and Half Hour, much to the chagrin of other senior people. So in this way we were inducted to the company that will make our professional career!!!

Now the next part of the training was to push off to our respective sales locations across India. So now comes the most important twist in our lives, where we will be going to for the next 1-year of our training. Since entire India was on platter so some is bound to get bad location. Some one got metro which can be seen from the smile and their faces, some one was cribbing at the system as he got Bihar and yours truly was the lucky/unlucky one to get UP.