Mahine ke wo din!!

This post is a homage to all those hapless souls who have spent/are spending the last day of 2014 holed up in their depots, chasing their monthly targets...

Ever since I started doing sales the phrase 'Mahine ke wo din' has taken on a totally different connotation. Though the experience of month closing comes pretty close to that of the mahine ke infamous dins, what with the excruciating pain of chasing unattainable targets, mood swings ranging from sudden bursts of love for the team members who don't betray you at this crucial juncture to wanting to hurl a few soap cartons on the entities who simply switch off their phones to escape the ASM's wrath, back pain from sitting on the uncomfortable depot chairs, food cravings from burning all those calories from walking around cartons in the depot admonishing/cajoling team members to stretch a bit more (I have taken the old idea advertisement 'walk and talk' to heart) and mild to massive headaches based on how tense you are and how many times the boss has chided you for not doing your numbers!

Come to think of it performance pressure behind closed doors would hardly intimidate an ASM so used are we to performing and then having that performance ,or the lack thereof, evaluated by our bosses in full public glare and that too rather critically!

The week preceding the D-day sees a flurry of activity. This is the time when the field officers resort to various measures to get maximum money  for primaries from distributors. There tactics can range from grovelling to cajoling to outright threatening with dire consequences  . The team deep dives into data and ties all lose ends which were hiterto left unattended. So you reach out to wholesellers and retailers with renewed fervour, seduce them with tempting 'last month of QPS' offers to tug at the heartstrings of these mercenaries, close the targets of your various stakeholder engagement programs. You call upon those distributors who will throw you the float(read more RTGS for primaries) that will keep you from drowning when the currents are rough. You tempt the salesmen to do more secondaries so they can earn higher incentives, and nag the field force on any parameter that you possibly can ,since you are their boss!

And then when the big day comes you travel to your depot which is almost always located in some remote corner of your city/town/hamlet to complete the last leg of this crazy game of month closing. Amidst rows and rows of neatly stacked cartons of soap and mosquito killers you establish the bastion from where the last leg of the war is waged while your team of warriors and foot soldiers battle it out on the ground.

The depot is a world in itself. In contrast to the torrid outside world of FMCG sales, the depot is a rather placid place where everything happens at its own sweet pace. The only occupants of these huge godowns spanning hundreds of square feet are unending rows of stacks of cartons (aka petis), and numerous men (for in sales testosterone trumps estrogen wherever you go!!); the depot guys, the brawny loaders who insure that every carton gets into it's rightful truck, the gruff truck drivers, and other support staff.

On the closing days the usual CFA din of trucks coming and going, of cartons being loaded and unloaded is drowned out by the ASMs and their unabated volley of incoming phone calls. "Kitna RTGS aya, primary kitna hua, 50 peti, 100 peti, 10 lakh aur chahiye, 5 lakh aur karao....." are the only things to be heard. Every conversation is about numbers. With every call the ASM quickly adds or subtracts numbers from their excel planning sheet and then looks at how best to make up for losses/adjust gains.

As the clock ticks and the morning changes to afternoon the adrenaline rush increases and so does the pace of chasing untraceable RTGS and errant field officers. This is also the time when it becomes pretty clear about how many FOs and distributors will renege on their commitment. So you start looking for other doors to knock on to prevent you from going under while at the same time lambasting the traitors. As the clock ticks further there begin the incessant calls from the boss and the office to take stock of things. In a bad month after every such phone call your blood pressure will rise a notch higher and your team will be at the receiving end till you hit the point where you realize that beyond this nothing can be done and you quietly hang up your boots and ruefully tell yourself 'tomorrow is another month!' and carry on!! But when all is going well you would be idling away time at the depot just waiting for the boss to call so you can tell him how you over-delivered and hope to hear him sing paeans while you bask in the warm glory of your achievement, for in FMCG sales such happy days are a rarity!

Late in the night you wrap up the billing,dead tired from all the shouting, planning, strategizing, ready to make the pilgrimage back home where based on how the day panned out you would either decide to crash, drink away your sorrows, quietly mope about being caught in this profession which makes your heart rate escalate at every phone call or feel like a complete sales stud for having delivered way beyond what you were asked and so would end another eventful closing.

It's raining men- Part 1

Early morning a car ferries me to a different location everyday in different parts of Telangana where I spend my working hours haggling and striking deals with multiple men in order to grow my business. Then there are the hours spent on the phone with a multitude of other men wherein I address their issues. All that one needs to do is give me a ring or fix a time to meet up and I take care of the rest.

Welcome to the world of FMCG sales where it is always raining men! Men of all sorts, all temperaments, on varying levels of the deceit scale, each a challenge in himself.

So please allow me to introduce these men of distinct characters and taste

Who have been around for a long long year

Stole many an ASM's soul to waste.....

1. The Boss (Formidable RSM)

When the ringing phone, not the alarm clock jolts you from your slumber every morning, you know you are in sales. More often than not the cock croaking to wake you up is none other than your boss.For us ASMs answering the bosses's call takes priority over even answering the early morning nature's call. The RSM makes his entire team skittle around month on month for his territory's performance is directly proportional to his pride. He knows his territory like the back of his hand and comes with super sensitive bullshit detectors built into his system. This creature of sales is unshakable such is his grit for insuring his territory does the number be it a good month or bad. He lives by the motto of squeezing out the last drops from his team members during a bad month. A fact of sales: the frequency of an RSMs phone call to the ASM is inversely proportional to the ASM's territory performance! He is the pantomath one goes to for advice/ complaints /last round of fire fighting. Piss this guy off and your life in sales would be one hell of a ride, literally!

2. The cab driver

Indispensable for an upcountry ASM. This man is privy to all that happens in your professional and personal life for you spend more than 12 waking hours travelling from one corner of your territory to another daily in his car. Most ASMs have a fixed driver of their own who doubles up as their personal bouncer, sounding board and their sole travelling companion. He knows all your team members by name, has their numbers stored in his phone, and actually chills with them on the days when you are staying over in an upcountry town. Not just that he often doles out pearls of wisdom on different aspects of a product, the kind of advertising required, the packaging, etc, stuff that marketing managers spend thousands to gauge from countless market visits. He also doubles up as an off-the-roles representative of your company as he has forcefully converted his entire family and peer group into loyal consumers of your company's products!He also solicits regular feedback on products from all his friends and neighbors and dutifully conveys it to you.  He becomes so intertwined in an ASMs life that he sits in meetings with distributors and field force and often accompanies us inside stores to see the ground reality.

3. The Field/Sales Officers

In the sales hierarchy the Sales officer is akin to the zamindars of feudal India. The nature of their job involves overseeing fragments of an ASM's territory and mercilessly extorting maximum sales from distributors and salesmen.They have seen different ASMs come and go. The dynamics of the field officers' universe are quite complex. They detest being passed on for promotions while fresh baked b-school kids take on the ASM mantle, but what irks them even more is their erstwhile colleagues becoming their very bosses!

These con men par excellence are the masters of prevarication.They know all the tricks (the good ones and the ones that must not be named) of sales.Taking a naive/new ASM for a ride is their biggest source of thrill. Dealing with Field officers and distributors, some of the most conniving specimens of humanity, is what makes an ASM wary of the human race in general. They know every conceivable trick that is their in the book of sales.

Without the field officer the ASM is like a rudderless ship floating in the vast ocean of distributors, wholesalers, retailers and salesmen.These sales officers are indispensable yet creatures to be vary of. I am quite sure the lyrics " I can't live...with or without you..." were written with this motley bunch of characters in mind.

To be continued (as there are so many more men leftover who deserve an honorable mention here)....

Prerequisites for being a sales ninja (aka an ASM)

To go from being a mere mortal MBA grad to a sales ninja (aka an ASM) requires certain special powers without which survival would be impossible.

To sum up, following are the weapons that one must possess in his arsenal to become the overlord of a territory:

1. Bodily elasticity + infinite capacity for expansion

Sales as a profession will make you grow, both literally and figuratively. I can't vouch for whether your career horizons will expand after your time in sales but your girth most certainly will, thanks to the sugar-laden tea and soft drinks that all your distributors and wholesalers will make you drink. If you deny, however politely, they would get offended. So after 1.5 years of growing beyond measure I have finally started refusing with the ruse "mujhe sugar ki problem hai!!" only then do they let you off the hook without making you feel guilty for refusing their 2 sip hospitality. Not to forget you will spend half your life in hotels eating oily spicy food which would further add to your bulk.

2. A large cooperative bladder

Not needed if you are a male ASM for the world is your urinal. If you are a girl ASM and that too an upcountry one then be prepared to grin and hold it in for non-shady toilets are a novelty to come by

3. A repertoire of corny Bollywood dialogues

There will be days when to coax the distributor to do your bidding you would actually end up saying things like " Aapki pareshani hamari pareshani hai" ,"hum saath saath hai", "hum hai to kya gam hai?" (I made up the last one but I swear I have actually used the other two!)

4.  The resilience of a cockroach

It is said that a cockroach can survive nuclear radiations 10 times more than what a human can withstand. Going by the resilience of the cockroaches in my kitchen I can certainly tell you that they can survive repeat attacks of very strong pest control sessions. You will need this resilience to go from one bad month to another when the dhandha is not happening. Also get ready for countless rejections as distributors, retailers and field officers will say no to you a thousand times "maedum target nahi hota, too heigh”,"maedum season nahi hai..." you would need a really thick hide to bounce back and ask them to do the same thing again and again and again. Soon you would start feeling like those Hindi film heroes of yore who relentlessly pursued the women they set their heart on and badgered the poor damsel till she gave in to his advances. If only your team would ever succumb in a similar manner!

5. A sympathetic ear

If you could never pull off being an agony aunt, then you are in the wrong boat. For an ASM is that special being with whom all field officers, retailers, distributors and wholesalers would share their sob story in a bid to make you pressurize them less for primaries, secondaries, process parameters and what not. So while you become a patient audience you need to also know how to separate the grain from the chaff and ask these guys to cut the crap and get on with their jobs.

6. A flair for covert undertakings

If you are the kind of person who grew up on a heady dose of The Five Found Outers, Secret Seven, Nancy Drews, Hardy Boys and Agatha Christies then you are in the right job. For when your team will complain of undercutting and maal coming from here and there you would need to don that detective hat and get into Sherlock mode to get to the bottom of the mystery. Hence would begin the process of tracing the vehicles unloading this stock, gathering photographic evidence, deep diving into all the data you have access to and decoding the trends. Not to forget blaming the ASM of the neighboring area, just for the kicks!

7. A chotu nokia phone

Going back eons on technology will come in handy as you would receive so many calls in one day that your smart phone would certainly crack under the pressure. Only a rudimentary Nokai, the one with FM and torchlight, has the mettle to be your constant companion as you climb mountains and wade through rivers to sell all the soap in your depot.

This is primarily what you would need to become a sales ninja. There might be things I am missing out on but with the month closing around the corner by brain is in freeze mode and cannot think of anything more than the number, which is certainly not happening this month. So dear readers why don't you show some kindness by buying soap from Telangana and help me close my number....

Genesis of a Sabunwali

How did I get here?

For the last 1.5 years I have been asking myself how exactly I landed up in sales and where do I go from here? Not in my wildest dreams had I imagined that after 2 years of MBA this is what I would be doing to earn a living! And then reflection takes me back to how a heart full of hope and the ignorance of youth catapulted me into this job that I have a torrid love hate relationship with.

My destiny seemed predetermined from the day I set foot in B-School. Finance and accounts were subjects far too advanced for my rudimentary and limited mental capacity. Ops bored me, and it was primarily to escape from IT that I had entered the hallowed portals of a B-School. Plus I was swayed by the 'glamour' of marketing, of bringing a brand to life, of pimping goods to consumers who most often desired but did not need them. A few trimesters into MBA and I was giddy with dreams of being a marketeer.I became the coordinator of the marketing club, editor of the marketing magazine, participated in and won marketing competitions, actually took the trouble to go through entire Kotler, the marketing bible for all B-Schools.

A marketing summer internship and a PPO later I was ready to enter the world of creating brands that work their magic on the psyche of the consumer but little did I know that the road to marketing is paved with years of slogging your ass off in the dirt and grime of sales if you do not come with an IIM A/B/C tag attached to your resume. And so it was that I was sucked into this vortex of FMCG sales and became a Sabunwali.........

Sabunwali? Who?

A team leader of 6 men, a 26 year old woman, I am the custodian of an annual turnover of 80 crores, and have close to 100 indirect reportees addressing me as 'Maedumm'. I am the manager of an entire state; all towns, villages, hamlets... - well basically anything from the depot to the shelves of your friendly neighbourhood paanwala, that falls in the defined geography, is under my lordship (or so I tell myself to make my job sound slightly glorious!!)

I play multiple roles; I am a ninja warrior, a fire fighter, the agony aunt of my team, the punching bag of my channel partners, the scapegoat for the boss and the guardian of my turf against stock inflows from nearby areas. For a living, I sell soap and other super useful FMCG products in the red corridor of upcountry India.

I am an FMCG ASM (Area Sales Manager). The breed that none other than a B-School graduate or those in the Indian FMCG companies can understand! Most 'normal' (aka uninitiated to sales) people I encounter cannot even fathom what the job description of an ASM reads like. And it is very difficult to answer questions like "Beta, where is your office?" "Beta, what are your office hours?"  "Beta, why do you travel so much, and where to?"

Having tasted the dust and grime of FMCG sales for 1.5 years, I often wonder as to how I never thought about the miraculous presence of a range FMCG goods in shops at every nook and cranny. I bow my head obsequiously to those mighty humans who ensure that outlets in every city, town and village in India are stocked to the neck with shampoos, soaps, insecticides, toothpastes, toiletries and the likes! I almost always took it for granted that my toothpaste and soap would just be sitting there on the shelf when I strolled casually to the neighborhood kirana shop. Little did I know that somewhere a person called the ASM was losing all their sanity on a daily basis to accomplish this superb feat!

We the ASMs of the FMCG companies operating in India should be thanked by the populace on a daily basis for providing them with the ways and means to keep their bodies, hair and teeth smelling nice and clean and for ensuring that their houses are free from insects. We endure hardship so that their stomachs are always full of their preferred junk food and fizzy/healthy drinks, and provide them with such easy access to all those little glittery packs of hundreds of useful things that line shop shelves. All that the people have to do is to walk to the shop/ get 'free home delivery', and we, the invisible elves of the FMCG world guarantee they get what they want and where they want it, without any heartache.

My profession is noble and completely devoted to public service. I have silently encountered all the brickbats that the evil world of sales has thrown my way, never asking the consumer for anything more than buying my product while shunning the competition. Since I am amongst those few unlucky souls who never get appreciated for the arduous risks they take in their daily mission to ease the life of their customers and make money for their companies, I have no other choice but to resort to writing a blog hoping that somewhere, some nice gentle soul would read the ramblings of an ASM trying to stay sane in the mad world of FMCG and thank me and all my counterparts for their multiple sacrifices and empathize with us and maybe pray to the god they believe in that we accomplish our monthly sales targets and not get chided by the boss for our inability to do so. And it is with this hope in my heart that I devote myself to writing this blog about the adventures/mis-adventures of this sabunwali.