#TheTruth @ sales training period :)

Do you really want to know what actually happens in sales training period of a FMCG company..!!!

I wrote this piece way back in early 2000 for an egroups on the request of a batch mate - who wanted to know what happens in a sales training of a FMCG company!

In the newspaper-periodical industry of India, there come several annual rituals. The most favorite of the business papers and less so for the general  interest ones comes in February-March - the b-school salary report, complete  with details of hi-tech interviewing (video-conferencing), foreign postings (Wall Street), ESOPs (nowadays, every Tom, Dick and Infosys) and the like.

In these kinds of the reports, the darlings of the media are always the I-bank/consultancy types. They are the ones who get the six-figure (dollar, not rupees) salaries, look like Charlie Sheen and throw attractive sound-bites ("the challenge of the job... the money is immaterial").

There is always a footnote in these articles about the FMCG industry - which takes in the maximum numbers at the lowest salaries (okay, okay - not the lowest but one of the lowest!) - and never offer foreign postings or dollar salaries. Forget foreign - they don't even offer metro (10 lakh+ towns - i.e. includes Patna and Raipur) postings... this industry solely attracts people on the basis of the Theory of Minimum Resistance. Once inducted into the company, they are sent to the remotest corners of the company (preferably where you particularly clueless about the language)

It all started with my first assignment  on a rural sales van in Tamil Nadu. We had been on the van for an inordinately long time - winding our way through tiny hamlets. I was singularly unsuccessful in spotting the 'rural boom' predicted by all the marketing gurus.

Maybe the dusty unmetalled roads and the half-naked kids blurred my vision a bit. If my linguistic limitations were somewhat problematic in Madras, they were insurmountable in these places. Tired of being an observer for a majority of the journey, I tried to make a sale in one of these stops. Finding a reasonably affluent-looking shop, I suggested a few products to the retailer - all of which were accepted without too much of a protest. The salesman accompanying me did the translation - and the retailer spoke a smattering of English. Emboldened by my initial successes, I tried to extend the products sold on these kind of routes. I suggested shoe-polish... by suggesting the brand name of the product.  Too much of marketing post-mortems at b-school led me to the illusion that every person on the face of the earth would be familiar with the name - if not the development of the brand.

"What's that?" - asked the retailer. "Shoe polish" - I answered, even demonstrating the product efficacy by pointing to my shoes. This caused a lot of mirth in the shop - as the retailer told the salesman something in Tamil, trying to stop laughing all the time.

The salesman looked despondent - as he translated. "Sir - he has offered a challenge. He has asked you to wait in his shop for the whole day. If you manage to find one - just one - shopper who wears shoes like yours, he will buy our entire stock at double the price." A more adventurous person might have taken up the challenge.

A similar place later threw up a different twist to the tale while I was trying to convince the retailer about the latent demand of the soap - by playing the ultimate trump card of popularity of the times. "It is being advertised on all episodes of KBC" - I said. "But nobody watches KBC here", he calmly countered. Seeing the look of incredulity on my face, he explained, "Star is a pay channel, you see... while you can get Zee for free." Here was a town that time forgot... so did the television ratings people.


Just when one is all set to write the  obituary of the Indian ICE dream, there comes another small-town which changes  the ending yet again. I had reached the distributor's office ahead of the appointed hour - and it hadn't reopened after lunch. I resigned myself to an hour's wait in the scorching sun. After all, Kanchipuram did not look like a place with a coffee-pub to while away an hour. In between the millions of sari-shops that lined the main road, I suddenly spotted an 'Internet - E-mail - Chatting' signboard. Quite elated at the sight of a 'connected world' - and a way to while away the lunch hour. I tried to locate the Internet parlour but there seemed to be only the sari shops.

One of the salesmen approached me with an oily grin and oilier hair. Very optimistic, I thought - if he wants to sell me a Kanchipuram silk. "Ganihelbyou, saar?" "Um - I was trying to locate the Internet place..." "Thizwaysaar." - and he waved me to come inside. Inside this sari shop? I must have looked very unconvinced as I started to step in. "Shoes oudside please." I took off my shoes and followed him over yards of silk and satin - into an air-conditioned anteroom. Eight terminals lined the walls - all of them complete with speakers, printers and the works.

As I logged onto to Hotmail through the lightning-fast connection, I thought my experience of the Indian contradiction was complete. Till of course, the time when I was greeted with four adjacent Internet parlours in Cudappah - but there was no power (for the next four hours) to run the Pentium III machines there.

When through with spotting contradictions, one has to contend with the backbreaking, skull-splitting modes of transport that connect the dots on the landscape. While jet-setting friends  take a stopover at Geneva, one has to wait at Bellary for the connecting bus to arrive - and one can amuse oneself with the calculating the Frequent Traveller  Miles accumulated by travelling in the state government buses for the past 181 days and 11200 miles. Just as a point of interest, the social hierarchy is very clearly mentioned in the buses of the Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation (APSRTC).

The first double seat is 'Reserved for MP'. The next is  'Reserved for MLA'. The next three are 'Reserved for Ladies'. Down South, they treat their ladies very well - but put them after their gods. The unending bus-trips to the innermost recesses of the states also lead to spinning of great epics of fantasy. There were diversions of other kinds available as well. I got off the bus at Tirupathi - and looked like the archetypal yuppie-on-a-hike, at least in those surroundings. Backpack, Bisleri bottle and all that.

Trying to remember the directions given by the office, I tried to navigate my way to the T.P. Area, where all the inexpensive (not "cheap"!) hotels promised to be. At this point, I was approached by a gentleman  (for the want of a better word) in a check-lungi and a t-shirt that read, "I met  my friends at batchmates.com". Having been warned sternly about the perils of  talking to strangers ever since I was three, I tried to ignore him and walked in  the general direction of the exit.

Trying to keep pace with me, he offered -  "Hotel, saar?" I slowed down a bit now. The ride was an arduous one and I desperately needed some sleep before I attacked my distributors. He tried again  - "Good, clean, cheap..." I was very tempted now.. this was when I broke into a run. Despite this and more than its fair share of other hazards, the job has its perks - however quirky and far-fetched it might be. And where can it be better demonstrated than the state of Bihar, which Microsoft Word insists, I change to Bizarre!

There was a crowd assembled in front of the distributor's office-cum-godown as I alighted from the car. The mood was distinctly restless - and it was definitely too big to be a lowly sales manager's reception party. The distributor broke away from the group as he saw me - and looked terribly gratified. As he shook (almost tore away, actually) my hand, he expressed his abject delight that a manager had 'desired'  to 'set feet' on his humble town. After the initial pleasantries completed in his office, I asked him the reason for the anxious assembly outside. "Oh nothing  serious", he said. "A van of mine got looted in the morning - they got away with  about 30000 bucks." "Uh - nothing? 30000 bucks? Won't you file a FIR or  something?" He smiled - "Kya hoga, saab? Nothing's going to come out of it - only a hell of a lot of problems. Yeh to roz ka maamla hain, lekin Manager thoda hi  roz aate hain?"

A hard-nosed businessman feels my visit is worth more than 30000  bucks - I don't know whether that was a tribute to me or the MNC I work for... But it is quite a high, all the same.

Just as it is a bit of a low to encounter places from history and literature, which turn out to be nothing like what they promised to be. Especially rivers have this uncanny knack of disappointing - in  fact, Wordsworth institutionalised it ever since he visited Yarrow. The bus grounded to a halt - somewhere in the middle of nowhere. My neighbour in half-mime half-Telugu explained that the engine needed some water before it could make the final 10-minute stretch to reach Kurnool town (Rayalseema, Andhra  Pradesh). A river lay ahead of us - a dilapidated board said 'Tungabhadra'.  Adolescent memories of one of the best historical novels to be written came back. "Tungabhadrar Tirey" (On the banks of Tungabhadra) a Bengali novel by  Saradindu Banerjee - recounted the tale of a thriving civilisation on the banks  of the eponymous river, which was something like the seminal fluid. Romantic  visions of a throbbing river were dashed by the sight of a trickle of water,  meandering its way through rocks and silt. The ten-minute break was simply not enough to philosophise about adolescent fantasies and their untimely demise.

This sales training exercise is a marketing textbook, travelogue, Dale Carnegie handbook, newspaper - all rolled into one. It is an attempt by the companies to stop its managers from reducing the marketplace into a matrix (plotting, say, affluence vs propensity to spend or something equally arbitrary!)  -  in which anything and everything can be reduced a coloured circle at a given  co-ordinate. And of course, underlining the basic paradox (or the hopelessness) of trying to sell chocolate chip cookies in Western Orissa.

But what actually comes out of the training?

1. A rudimentary grasp of the language/dialect (and accent) of the region of training.

2. Knowledge about the cheapest beer-bars of the  town of posting.

3. Endless cups of tea consumed at the largest wholesale counters  there.

4. A shift in reading habits -  from A&M to Stardust because the  friendly bookshop owner has never heard of the former.

5. A healthy disrespect for the b-school curriculum. An even healthier contempt for the country's infrastructure.

And of course -

6. The extremely misplaced confidence that shows through when somebody asks "What do you do?" and one answers, "I sell soap in  Bihar".