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)....