Monday, March 27, 2006
Stage 3 Landing up in the market
As soon we take a sales job, we think we are doing company a favour and in repayment we want metro posting. But the sales experience in a metro is vastly different than in an Up country. As they say, if you have worked in Eastern UP, you can work anywhere in India, so I started his sales training stint in Gorakhpur. But if it would all been easy then why there is so much hype about FMCG and Eastern UP.
I boarded the train from to Gorakhpur. There is no pantry car in the train. Not a single station on the route is good enough to get down - forget having food. The train stops anywhere and everywhere, when people pull the emergency chain to stop the train may be right outside their house!! And in this particular journey the train was delayed by 4 hours (when entire journey was of 5.5 hrs). I didn’t feel very eerie and yucky as I think of that journey, coz it was a regular schedule for few months stay at that place. I was very happy in the company. Touring new places (don’t know how UP locations was different and interesting from Europe/US locations in any IT Company which I left to join FMCG). Since ages this place was more famous for its goons than anything else. There were more shops of guns than the medical shops. But as someone said ‘Insanity does not die sooner’ so traveling across deeper remote areas was becoming the norm. Traveling across dust-ridden roads (basically pot holes covered with mud) across in bus, van, bike and cycle were the perks attached with this.
As soon we take a sales job, we think we are doing company a favour and in repayment we want metro posting. But the sales experience in a metro is vastly different than in an Up country. As they say, if you have worked in Eastern UP, you can work anywhere in India, so I started his sales training stint in Gorakhpur. But if it would all been easy then why there is so much hype about FMCG and Eastern UP.
I boarded the train from to Gorakhpur. There is no pantry car in the train. Not a single station on the route is good enough to get down - forget having food. The train stops anywhere and everywhere, when people pull the emergency chain to stop the train may be right outside their house!! And in this particular journey the train was delayed by 4 hours (when entire journey was of 5.5 hrs). I didn’t feel very eerie and yucky as I think of that journey, coz it was a regular schedule for few months stay at that place. I was very happy in the company. Touring new places (don’t know how UP locations was different and interesting from Europe/US locations in any IT Company which I left to join FMCG). Since ages this place was more famous for its goons than anything else. There were more shops of guns than the medical shops. But as someone said ‘Insanity does not die sooner’ so traveling across deeper remote areas was becoming the norm. Traveling across dust-ridden roads (basically pot holes covered with mud) across in bus, van, bike and cycle were the perks attached with this.
F-1 race
Once I was visiting one of the rural areas I was amazed to see all the people of that village looking towards us in a very surprised and suspicious way. When I asked my salesmen about that he said, “Sir, this is the area of “Dadua Pehalwan” the famous goon turned politician. Any big car/official who comes so deep here gets kidnapped. Its already one hour here, he must have got information about us so we should better push off else we would be filling his coffer through ransom amount”. Instead of wasting the time in abusing the salesman for not revealing this earlier we just pushed off from that place in our Indica that was running more that 120 Kmph, may be beating Ferrari on the way and relaxed only when we reached the city limits.
Another day I heard the news that one of our salesmen got looted while he was returning home. I rushed to the distributor point and much to my amusement, there was no tensions prevailing. Everyone was as cool as ever. When I enquired few of them as to shouldn’t we report to the police, they said “Sahab, yeh to roz ki baat hai, police ka cut to unko pehle hi pahunch gaya hoga, aur agar hum report karnge bhi to 500-1000 Rs ka choona aur lag jeyaga par hoga kuch nahi”.
All said and done, it was the one of the most interesting 6 months of my life. There you can actually learn all the tricks of trade, the significance of state/country border area in normal trading, the magic of counterfeits, the power of your stock being looted and sold it back to you. Still people are doing business amid all these “perks” attached and running it successfully. It is an amazing experience to share with.
I am not comparing the jobs/locations/industry but all I wanted to say is if at all some one says I know all about marketing and the techniques on how to sell, just send him to areas like UP/Bihar and then see the result.
All said and done, it was the one of the most interesting 6 months of my life. There you can actually learn all the tricks of trade, the significance of state/country border area in normal trading, the magic of counterfeits, the power of your stock being looted and sold it back to you. Still people are doing business amid all these “perks” attached and running it successfully. It is an amazing experience to share with.
I am not comparing the jobs/locations/industry but all I wanted to say is if at all some one says I know all about marketing and the techniques on how to sell, just send him to areas like UP/Bihar and then see the result.
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]