Selling mobile phones !!

Its been exactly 336 days since i last blogged( 2010 is not a leap year)..time not permitting n even when it did, paucity of creative ideas . Even today i ve nothing tangible to write about but the fascinating experience i ve amassed in the last one year.

Basically, I took up my first job in a company that was in a sector which in turn happens to be the fastest growing one in the economy( that's hw folks at business news channels describe it).
Insurance and telecom are two educated guesses..but i was/am in the business of selling mobile phones.

Being introvert by nature but never when there s a bragging contest goin on, I was thrown into the open world to face retailers and distributors who had established businesses running for years that sometimes surpassed my humble age. So one really had to develop the smarts to negotiate and deal with them on a daily basis. Since the channel partner and the company representative have to build a good working relation, there are occasional conversations over tea-not about the economy or the industry or political thoughts but about the weather,the sucrose/lack of it in the tea,about how one employee from X company became his friend or about how good his political links are in his state. Sounds interesting na.

We in our economics class had learned about how one looks at an 'opportunity cost' for every penny one spends. Some of these guys ve formulated 3-4 more mathematically proven ways to assess where every rupee of their capital should be devoted to. So, any B-school gyan should not be rigidly adhered to and so should be left open to be contested was one of the first lessons that I learnt.

During this period, I ve met various kinds of people- sophisticated to downright down market to inspid ones to non-chalant braggadocios. One year well spent in the 'market' makes you much more worldy wise , smart and develops in you a divine ability to save your ass evrytime its on fire. Sales as is thought, in the junior management level is much more tactical and is more about fire fighting day to day issues. But if one has a larger perspective of where the industry is heading to vis-a-vis where your prdct stands and then chalk out ways to expand its presence and thereby ' ve the enviable feeling of viewing your product being held in most hands that you happen to see on road, you feel a tad bit nice.

This happened to me when I was in the city of Kota- which boasts of a student population of around 2-3 lacs, which usually lives in a separate part of the city called New kota. Since my brand always has had a good imagery amongst the youth and coupled with decent distribution reach, one used to feel nice , seeing younsters hold one or two very high selling model of ours. Dont know how the Nokia sales managers would feel for it holds almost 55 percent of the mkt.But mine was a start up while the latter is an established behemoth.

The journey for me has only started and I hope to assimilate every such experience and savour them for the time to come.

Chao.