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Memoirs of
an FMCG Management Trainee Program -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This
is forwared by a batchmate of mine whose colleague at an FMCG company wrote this
. Published with permission from the forwarder. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----Original
Message-----
From: Anupam Katheriya
Sent: 06 September 2002 17:42
To: Alex Joseph; Nitish Bajaj; Msn. Nishant; Shoubhik Dasgupta; Ketan
Vaghela
Subject: Memoirs of an FMCG Management Trainee Program
A
Great note....
A
tribute to the "FMCG Training"...!!!!
Regards,
Anupam
I wrote this piece 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 famous among them is the year-end 'special issue'.
Another such ritual is a cover story on sexual liberalization and/or
social Talibanisation.
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. The profusion of cinema theatres and the paucity of the
fairer sex prompted romantic epics, mostly.
Innumerable re-hashes of the "boy-meets-girl" theme abound, all
suited to fit the yuppie-in-the-jungle mould. A sales trainee (boy) is on
his way to a sales point on the overnight bus where he meets another sales
trainee (girl) going to the same place. Love blossoms amidst cartons of
soap and sacks of detergents - ad nauseum. But then, what else can one
do when a ramshackle behemoth of a vehicle is hurtling over the countryside
at 70 mph - with the potholes outside and the blaring video inside making it
impossible for a minute's sleep.
In fact, sex seemed to be on everyone else's minds as well - especially
the surrogate kind. If the hotel had a TV in the rooms, it had to have FTV.
Without fail. 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, as the prospect of
locating the fabled T.P. Area seemed distinctly uninviting. His trump card
of his offer came through - "Ladies also, saar. No problems, very
safe..." In my fresh-out-of-school innocence, I thought he meant that
the hotel would be very safe for any ladies who may be accompanying me. So
I said, "No - no ladies" in the halting Tamil-accented English
that had seen me through most of small-town South India. His eyes
brightened up - "No ladies,
saar?
Young boys then? Also very safe..." 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 an area sales 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 ASM 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, the MNC I work for or Laloo
Prasad Yadav. 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".
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