What to expect from a Sales Job after MBA!

1. Your Targets – That’s the first word that pops into your mind when you hear ‘Sales’ and sure it is the first thing that you are fed with once you are ‘Sales – ready’. It all starts from this one most dreaded word. This is one number that constantly hovers around your mind most of the time. And after 20^th of every month, this number starts intruding your sleep and can give the ghosts in your nightmares a run for their money. Suddenly you will recite this holy number even when you are deep asleep. Suddenly you will realise you remember this number more than your best friends birthday.

2. Your Product – Before being sales ready, you are given a bible of sorts about the product you are going to sell. Trust me it is the best sleep inducer. You try to read the alien language and repeatedly fail after the 3^rd page and promise yourself – “Next time, I am gonna read it full No matter what”. And thus you give birth to a fine art which is overused ruthlessly & repeatedly – ‘Procrastination’. You master it as time passes. But thankfully this stops much later when you start answering the customer with “Sir, I will get back to you on this”. This is when you will go back to the biblical product book and will read all those words with so much enthusiasm like never before. You will suddenly see your product everywhere while previously you never knew this product even existed. The very sight of it make you go “hey I sell them!” with a glee. You get possessive about your product and donot like a single word against it. This is when you know about your product like never before. Its like an arranged marriage of sorts, you don’t have a choice but to love your product.

3. Your Boss – Usually a guy who had started like you. Do not presume he doesn’t know the ground realities. Don’t make false stories of why something didn’t happen. You will be caught and bowled. He will be behind you all the time like a thermo-sensing missile, like a Hutch Pug – ‘where ever you go our network follows’. He will ensure that your life is a pressure cooker. The more heat on your bum, the more you whistle. At times he will show you your real worth, will prove how a big mistake was it to recruit you, how useless you are and the list of insults goes on. At the beginning you take it to heart and his words keep banging your head all the time. Later you get accustomed to it. Moral of the story : Don’t take your bosses brickbats very seriously learn to shut off when he starts his blah, but take his praises more than seriously (you will get to hear it very rarely)

4. Your Life – If you are someone who has never lived out of your home, things are going to be really different for you. Suddenly you will get to learn a lot of things which you thought were by default your Bai’s. You learn to wash your clothes by your own hand, you broom, clean your utensils. You get to know the prices of groceries & vegetables; even names of some you never knew. You will work on Saturdays; your Sundays will seem longer. You will find yourself watching every stupid movies releasing on friday. Your laptop is full of stuffs like ______ (Fill in the blanks as per your own interests). Facebook is where you meet your friends. You will start calling people whom you used to ignore just to hear someone talking. You will feel happy to see your home location in movies, in my case ‘Mumbai’ - which is seen in every second movie. You will stare people speaking your mother tongue as if you seen a UFO full of Martians. You suddenly start liking the “The customer is on another call” message, because you feel like home when you hear it in Marathi. Maggi is your saviour when the cook bunks work. You start learning how to use different weapons in kitchen. You will search for holidays to book tickets to your hometown. When you reach home, you tell mom to cook all those things you generally complained about for having every second day. Your 2 days in your home-city = 1 month in your job location.

Despite all odds, I believe the learning is immense. You are enlightened by the fact that not everything Philip Kotler said was true. All those presentations, projects, assignments, case-studies etc will seem fake and will fall flat on your face. You learn what really works and what not. This is truly the first step for all Marketing Aspirants. You get to evolve as a person. You become Independent and start becoming more responsible. You get to meet new people, see new places and learn new things. I was hesitant and apprehensive at the beginning to take up this assignment. Now when I look back I feel,I would have missed a great deal had I declined it. 

My Experiments with Kitchen

Off late I have been staying with a colleague of mine as a make-shift arrangement, as my company sponsored hotel accommodation had surpassed its day limits and I haven’t yet found a roof for myself yet. My colleague who is shortly planning to get settled has made this place a ‘proper home’ unlike the transit-camp like bachelors home. Every morning I used to wake up late shamelessly, and used to find him making some breakfast for both of us. Today was different, I woke up and the kitchen was waiting for some one to come and use it. My colleague had gone to his hometown for a ceremony. It was an early morning hunger and old habits die hard. Subconsciously my hand opened the refrigerator and found nothing but milk, water, jam nothing of which could be eaten as breakfast as it it. Ok I could get a pack of bread from the store down, if it was open. If you are planning to have bread in the morning, postpone your breakfast till atleast 11 am. That’s when the shops open here, take it or leave it – that’s Raipur for you! So bread-jam was out of choice, I raided the kitchen to find one packet of maggi, and I was unsuccessful. My tummy kept growling and I couldn’t think of something to keep it quite. I suddenly recalled, once as my colleague was making poha, I casually asked him, how is it made and he had told me the recipe like a quick tip. Being from Indore, poha came naturally to him. I had the entire kitchen with me and this was possibly the best time to experiment, there is no one to laugh! So I took the plunge and tried recalling and doing the steps –

1. Take some poha, salt, garam masala, haldi powder. Some? This is the most difficult aspect to start with, you don’t know exactly what is ‘some’. Is it a handful? 2 Cups, 1 teaspoon, pinch? You will just not know it unless it is made and eaten. The next time when you make it the ‘some’ changes and it keeps on changing after each attempt till you have mastered the art. Its like repeated iterations till you find the perfect unkown in an equation. (Ok if you dint get this, not your fault, we engineers have learnt a lot of useless stuff which we like to flaunt whenever we get an opportunity to relate it with real life. This was one of them!)

2. Wetten your poha and add ‘some’ garam masala, Haldi powder and Salt to it. Mix them well and you can already smell the masala which boosts your confidence.

3. Chop onions and green chilly, ignore the shape of onion pieces you have cut. It will never match your mom’s. So leave it like that, start liking it. Any ways its gonna go inside your tummy.

4. Take a tawa, heat it. Hell! Why isn’t the stove not burning? Tick, tick, tick! Failed! I bend down to see the cylinder knob. I look closely whether the position is really ‘close’ or ‘open’ and what is exactly close or open. This is what happens when you use the stove after a really long time. The last time you used it was when you had to make maggi when your mom had went out and you were hungry.

5. Back to the tawa. Carefully add drops of oil and let it heat till ‘some’ time. Now comes some audio part – Rai Fodni! This is something basic common denominator for most of the Indian food. I gave my mom credits for this as the mustard seeds fell from my hand into the oil. Add the chop onions and chilly to it.

6. Now add the wet poha to this tawa, stir it with some utensil, I don’t know what it is called. After doing this for a while, remove it from the stove and add some bhujia to it. (Atleast bhujia would be edible for sure, since I haven’t made it.)

 

Tadaaaaa! Hopefully I have made something reasonably edible. I prayed as I put one spoon of it in my mouth. I didn’t want to throw it in the garbage bin. And Voila! The poha tasted surprisingly good with a pinch of salt more than required, which can be forgiven. In case you actually read this recipe religiously just a warning: I was plain lucky!

Corporate Debut

This is a post which is a compilation of me and my friend’s experiences when you join an organisation. You need not go through each one of this, but some of them should make some sense to you. For all those who are already working, this might bring back memories of your initial days, for others this is something you may expect!

Day 1: Form-ality

Forms, Forms & More Forms. You realise, you have been using the PC much more than the mighty pen. Your fingers struggle to control the way the pen moves and you write in a handwriting you don’t recognize as yours. The Bank Guy opens a salary account for you on the spot which might have taken ages and repeated visits had you visited a bank yourself. You sign at atleast 100 places, each one differently. You check out your Debit Card and the Cheque Book in a way a Kid checks out his new toy. You try to break ice with other colleagues joined with you. The HR usually are often amused to see such bunch of confused souls joining together and pray that they don’t have to find replacement for them soon.

Day 2: Where’s my place?

This is one thing everyone is very excited about - Your cubicle! The Place where you would be chatting, whining, cursing, swearing, gossiping, bitching, sleeping, playing games, secretly logging to Gmail & FB and sometimes even do a bit of work! Once you get to know where your cubicle is, you do the recee of the area and try to find the ‘safest’ angle and position of your seat. Office privacy is ofcourse a topic of high importance. Allright what have we got here – A PC! Lets switch it on. Window --> IE -->”Windows cannot display your page”. Damn! Now what? OK lets try something else, Windows -->Games -->Solitaire, Yaay! Solitaire is something you will definitely find in any pc even if it doesn’t have a thing to keep you busy. So ensure you know how to play Solitaire.

Day 3: Know thy neighbours

You introduce yourself to your cubicle-ites. You are taken around and introduced to each and every person on the floor. After sometime, you start noticing the grin on your introducer’s and others face or is it just a figment of your imagination? You hear voices, ‘why on earth has he/she joined here”. Your jaws start aching after putting up a fake smile to each and every one. Smiling despite apprehension, confusion and nervousness does take efforts. People say the feeling is similar when you get married.

Day 4: Hello? IT helpdesk? Ohhh….Ok I will call again later

You have now become a champ of solitaire and there is nothing more to achieve. You realise you cannot live without the most and probably the only useful, important and interesting part of your PC viz the Internet. You call up probably one of the most busiest dept in any office – The IT helpdesk. Their hectic schedule is a shadow of goof-ups they have given birth to. So after umpteen calling back again and followups, the online ticket is raised whose status keeps yo-yo-ing between pending and resolved. They have a six-sigma for not solving the issue correctly the first time. Finally the matter is solved and your PC suddenly becomes much more interesting than ever before.

Day 5: Love thy neighbours

“Hey why don’t you join us for lunch?” – you hear this and are relieved that you would not be eating alone from now onwards. After many lunch and coffee/smoke/drink sessions, your colleagues turn into friends. They tell you the ‘who-is-what’s, how to deal with different kind of creatures in the office, the affairs, working proxies etc. This is the real induction.

Day 6...10..30...: Monday

You have been pretty much doing nothing for many days since you joined except for going through the same presentations repeatedly, surf the net, chat and keep checking the PC clock till 1.30 pm lunch and 6 pm to leave for the day. .Monday is synonymous to the day when your actual work begins. This can be day 6 for some, day 10 for some, even day 35, 50, 60 for the unlucky. Some noble soul realises someday that you have been sitting idle and being wasted for long enough. And you for once and for the first and last time become actually happy to get some work! You start taking baby steps, trying to stand, holding finger and walking and finally walking alone and after some time running, jumping too. You have done it all. You do this day in and day out. This gets xeroxed day after day. This is when your job starts becoming routine. You start waiting for Friday like a prisoner awaits end of his term and wish the next Monday never comes. Now you have truly arrived. Welcome to the corporate world!

Raipur Diaries - 1

As my flight was about to land at Raipur Airport, I was shocked looking at the cattle and fields from the fibreglass windows of Airbus. 'Why are they punishing me by sending me here!?' was the thought continuously buzzing around my mind like a honeybee. I got down at the Fan-Conditioned Airport and was received by the hotel guy. Throughout the 40 minute drive through the fields and trees, I  kept questioning the credibility of Google Maps. Hell! Wait a minute, this was not the Raipur I had seen on Google. Crosschecked the ticket - It said 'Raipur'. Finally I could see few buildings and some more as I realised we had entered proper city and the airport was on the outskirts. I managed to restart my heartbeat and bring back my breath. Raipur did begin with a kind of shocker.

Its been 3 days now since I joined office. I had just started getting along with the like-aged colleagues who were searching for accommodation just like me. It is a pain finding rental homes here for bachelors and people shoo you as if you are a salesman. Their eyes will scan you as if you are a terrorist and want the flat for planning a nuclear bomb attack in Raipur, of all! Wish Google could help us with it. Roaming around in search of a home, I made good friends with them. On the fourth day we planned to watch a movie in the cinema next to our office. For once, I thought maybe I will stop missing Mumbai now that I have made friends here and found out some options to hangout. This thought was dampened by the sudden rains that fell on my forehead as we moved out of the Mall. This rain felt like a stranger to me. This was not the usual thick, continuous, heavy rains of Mumbai. No matter how much It causes you inconvenience, still there is something about Mumbai Rains which you would appreciate only when you are out of the city. Some things cannot be explained it can be just experienced! I guess it will take a little more longer to stop missing my good old city of dreams!

Re-Boot!

For the first time in my life, I am not able to find words to write a new post as I am sitting on the Mumbai Airport Lounge waiting for my flight to Raipur! Yes, you heard it right. In case you were weak at geography or GK for that matter, It is the capital city of Chattisgarh. This state is known only for three things - The forests filled with of dacoits, majority of the Tigers still alive in India and The Naxals. Well this is the popular opinion about the city (supposed to be), where I am being posted after a month long stretched Training period come paid holiday from Tata Motors. Its strange where life takes you. I had never in my wildest dreams imagined to go to Raipur from a fast paced Mumbai full of friends, family and fun! As I sit here, on a crossroad, a crucial juncture of my life, I look back and rewind the good old days in Mumbai. It was yesterday night that 'the government' enjoyed it's probably the last such 'Ice-cream cum booze weekend'. With Dan moving out of Country, Craig trying to tie a knot before the wine ages more and Me chasing the great Indian dream, we are not sure when will that day come again when we laughed endlessly, did crazy acts and had loads of fun together. But looking back, I was lucky that we had so much of fun for the last 7 years, I couldnt ask for more. As I wait for my flight to arrive, I am trying to leave things behind and move ahead with optimism and embrace the change. Everything happens for a reason and for good!