The Hindu Business Line : The Great Indian Salesman

THIS will be the last installment of a long-running column, `SaleSense'. This column has run for all of 47 sales-centric fortnights! I thought it appropriate to dedicate it to the great Indian salesman. Sing his praise and criticise his shortcomings.

The Great Indian Salesman is different. A rare animal altogether! Quite like the Great Indian Bustard. Rare. Accomplished. Revered. Respected. And maybe on the way to extinction. And that is the sad part of it all.

The Great Indian Salesman is a guy who can work in any market-space and make a success of it. The Indian geography is as tough and tumultuous as they come. If you have worked as a salesperson in India, you can make it happen wherever you go.

This guy has been through the acid test of a market that is diverse and `a-clonal.' For a start, he cannot be one salesperson. He needs to be many. He is an accomplished person who knows how to change his skin for whichever market. No two markets he works in are just the same. No two beats are replicable pr predictable. His market is never boring and static.

The second big exciting factor is the way it offers a huge opportunity for the selling process itself. The salesman in this market is a real seller. He is not quite what his counterpart in Berlin or Bogota may be, a mere distributor of the product or service. A mere intermediary who de-bulks and distributes. A postman of sorts whose role is for the supply to find its point of front-end demand in the retail marketplace.

The salesman out here is a seller in the real sense. Meet the salesperson of insurance and see his manner. Meet the salesperson of your friendly pack of tea, turmeric or tamarind — they are real solid sellers. If you are on the other side of the counter as a buyer, these are exciting people to meet. These guys have a sting in their tail and their selling line is a strong and ever-evolving one.

The Great Indian Salesman is an institution in himself. Every market has a hero. Every retail aggregation has the story of a killer salesman to offer you. Every positive praise and stroke offered to the glib guy with the sales kit has the guy moving forward with greater and greater gusto.

This guy can perform many roles, even. And he has. He can be active, he can be passive. He has been aggressive as he has been subtle and submissive. He can take insult with dollops of salt and vinegar. And he can be quick with the repartee.

Many years ago, working the market with a senior salesman of mine in good old Tindivanam, my salesman and I came across an angry retailer. He was complaining of rats in his shop. Our packs of tea, which had silver foil on their sides, were apparently a big point of rat attack. The logic was simple: apparently the rats in his shop did not attack any other tea packs as they were all opaque cartons or opaque paper packs. Our innovation of offering fresh-looking silver foil packs was a problem. The rats apparently found their reflections on the silver foil, got irritated, imagined them to be other aggressive rats and fought a mighty battle with the pack.

The problem was real. Retailers demanded stocking cases from us for our new packs. We had damages galore in the market. As we invested in these storage racks, the sales force had to manage the problem.

Sankaran from Tindivanam had unique and funny answers for every angry retailer we visited with the problem. Anger management was his art. Handling insult was a skill. Battering psyche was something he wanted and asked for. At the end of the day, humour was what he offered. The Great Indian Salesman handles it all with a passion for rustic humour. Humour that is relevant to the kind of markets we are talking about. The Great Indian Salesman is an intelligent salesperson who handles anything that comes by his way.

I remember one of Sankaran's many solutions for the Tindivanam problem. The guy offered, in all seriousness, a live cat as a prize on a purchase slab for a quantity purchase-cum-display scheme (QPDS to the well-initiated)! The guy seriously asked me, his boss, to organise this!

And guess what? Sankaran carried into the market with him on his next market rounds a live cat which did not quite enjoy all the attention it was getting, I am sure! The retailers enjoyed it all.

The Great Indian Salesman leads a tough life. At least, he used to. There was a time when a retail salesperson in the FMCG space was to work all of 45 outlets a day. Outstation salespersons had market stretches which would involve an 80 km coverage area per day. Market working with stock was the norm. Order booking was a sin. And the salesman did everything with little assistance. He loaded the van for the day, unloaded the stock lorries that reached his depot, literally dusted the packs on the shelves, loaded the shelves, talked his way into the fickle heart of the retailer, seeded his nuggets of wisdom and humour all around, and built a great bit of equity for the company he represented.

In all of this he avoided two sensitive subjects: Politics and religion.

The insurance salesperson wanted to cover all of 12 potential clients a day, the durables guy covered all of 35, and the man in pharma did 15 doctor visits and all of 15 retail! Things have, however, changed! The Great Indian Salesman does things differently today. There are still, however, old and unsung souls in the market who still plod on and fulfill the purpose of their selling organisation, which has today become a purpose of their life even.

How different are you today? Ask yourself and compare the template of the old with that of what you follow today. The foundation of great Indian selling was established by the salesman who worked differently.

How different have you got to be from this great Indian salesperson of yore? Have the new templates altered selling efficiency levels altogether? Is the role of selling in your life getting lesser and lesser than ever before? And is this losing a key cutting edge our army of salespersons maintained for decades together as we built the consumerist market of today?

If there is an award out there that must go to the one biggest contributor of the success of corporations in India, it is to the great Indian salesperson. The unsung heroes of a war that lasted them all of their lifetime!

(The author is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.)

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