Learnings from 1 year in corporate world post MBA

Beginning is always the hardest. Especially when you are joining a team in which your peers have significant amount of experience in the same field and it involves dealing largely with people. Therefore, I feel that it is important for me to share my experience at the time when fresh college graduates are joining the organisations with which they will be starting their career. 

As far as my plan is concerned, I wanted to go out with an open mind, observe and learn as much as possible at initial stage. Of course the class room theoretical business solutions are not exactly same as the practical ones but it is important to draw some commons between both of them as it helps you in connecting the dots. While I feel that these learnings should help most of the people, there will always be instances where probably a different approach may provide the better results. Therefore, I feel that these learnings should be taken as a reference and not as text book solutions. 

One year down the memory lane, following are my learnings: 

1. Most of the time, going back to the basics help immensely. I remembered a concept from the college learning that two things do most of the work in sales – 1) Availability 2) Visibility. Whenever things are not going as per the plan, ask yourself what is being done to ensure the availability and visibility of product and 9 out of 10 times you’ll the get answer on what needs to be done next. Trust me, it’s all chaos out there once entered into the markets and people do tend to forget even the basic things. Once all the fundamentals are in place, other projects could be worked upon in order to increase business. 
2. A short sales stint helps tremendously at the start of the career. It makes you humble and considerate of both sales executives and customers. When I started handling the territory assigned to me, I had certain notions about what a sales manager should do and what a sales executive should. However, once you start loving the sales process, the work you’re doing doesn’t matter as long as it is helping you in enabling the sales executives in making sales happen. After you move to the product team, it helps you immensely in handling internal communication, designing product messaging and preparing product training programs. 
3. In almost all of the industries, a typical sales executive sells more than one product to customers. Most of the time your product may not even be his core product that he has been asked to sell. If that’s the case, then why he/she should prefer selling your product? One of the differentiated approach should be to first understand the sales executive’s preference and priorities. Then you should derive the correlations between your product and the core product he is selling. Discuss with him the pain areas and how your product can help him achieve his overall targets. This will not only create a sense of obligation on him but also, he will be more open to discuss his ideas with you. Believe me, such short but consistent engagements will improve the recall of your product substantially. 
4. One of easiest trap I have seen people falling in is that they start judging their job even before they settle in. Trust me, there is lot more in store than what you have exposed yourself to. Yes, many a times it’s difficult to adjust at the start especially because so many things including place, food, people around change and adapting may take a while. Give yourself time and space to learn new things and take decisions regarding changing job/profile/location accordingly. 
5. Make plans with keeping two things in your mind; Short run deliverables and long run deliverables. Short term plans will include tactical level plans and will help you in understanding what you need to do for the day, for the week and for the month. The long term plans should include things such as where do see yourself and the organization you’re working with in, say, after 6 months or a year after. Not everything will go 100% as per the plan, but it’ll give a sense of direction as it very easy to get too much occupied in the day to day activities and lose the sight of vision. It will also help you in benchmarking what you delivered with what you wished to achieve and work on the gaps accordingly. 
6. Last but not the least, DO NOT GET TOO MUCH WORKED UP ON APPRAISAL / RATINGS IN VERY FIRST YEAR ITSELF. Discussion on appraisals are time consuming, pointless; rather worse than pointless exercise because most of the time it makes you focus on wrong things. If focus is on learnings and understanding the As-Is scenario in organization, your rating is going to be fine. 

I hope you enjoyed the post and found it informative. Let me know your feedback in the comment section. 

Thank you!

Vijay

A Buoyant Realm: Incredible India

The Republic of India, the largest democracy of present times, has a culture, more than 5000 years old, with its foundation dating back to the Vedic Age. All the beliefs and practices, crafted by the greatest educators of the Ancient Era are enlightening the world even today. The country was known as the educational hub, which always played a vital role in the up-lifting of the society on a global scale. Its mythology, literary traditions and Hindu philosophy portray its vivid greatness.

The rich heritage was so alluring that even foreign clans of medieval times couldn’t resist directing their interest towards this heaven on Earth. Repeated attacks by Mongol raiders, rule by the Mughal Empire, and loot by Western Powers have been accounted in the Indian history that was finally over after years of struggle and brawl, when India gained its independence in the year 1947, with only one vision: To give a shape to the Gandhian dream of ‘Ramrajya’. A constitution, which was vital to India’s self image, was formed in 1950 that put in place a secular, sovereign and a democratic republic on the pandemic front. We started working together to make our country, Incredible India, so that we could provide food, water and electricity to every citizen of the nation. We started developing with an amazing pace, in spite of the numerous challenges ahead of us.

Today, it’s been 61 years and an obvious question arises: Did we really achieve those targets that we set? Well, it’s really disappointing to say that the answer is ‘No’. We still have major a part of our population below poverty line in both rural and urban areas. Unreliable infrastructure, religious and caste related violence, Naxalite insurgencies, separatists in Jammu and Kashmir, and the most critical; Corruption, are amongst other grave problems. Corruption in India has reached feverish level. Bofors scandal, Share Market scandal, crooked 2G scandal, Commonwealth Games issue and many more cases have cost us billions of dollars.

The metaphor ‘Incredible India’, which was suppose to demonstrate our rich cultural heritage, moral values and traditional way of life, now stands absurd. It tells us about our contention with poverty, corruption, unemployment, and many other distressing affairs.

Now the time has come to take matters to the grass root level & by making people aware of these humongous problems. Programs like Jan Chetna, Competition Commission of India, Masum India, and Wildlife Trust of India, etc. can make people acquainted with the present scenario who, through appropriate actions shall alleviate from these problems. We need to add more and more people to these groups as well as instigate all the other coteries serving the same purpose to form a nexus to strengthen the movement. We can support the deprived crowd of India to attain their rights through a collective, cooperative and united effort. Further, we can help people in building their capacities through social education, training and information dissemination to take collective actions to resolve their issues.

It is true that at present, we are facing a number of snags, but we should not forget that there is always a hope; a silver lining. India can become ‘Incredible’ for sure provided necessary plans are realised and executed in a supportive and proper way.

Virat Kohli: Tendulkar of the Future

What could be the worse day in anyone’s life than the day of his father’s death? A day, which can make you emotionally drained, mentally wear out and even die down your all kind of strengths. On the same day, a youngster with the greatest level of commitment and determination comes to play for his running down team Delhi. What could be a better example of dedication, perseverance and staunchness than Virat Kohli’s stand for his team on such a crucial time?

A stiff, unbendable look, well focused eyes, a perfectly carved athletic body for a sporting personality, tattooed skin set him apart from the other young cricketers. He reins in his aggressive instinct, who knows how to handle the adverse situations and unfavorable conditions very well. A unique combination of persistence, enthusiasm and devotion gives Virat an edge over the other youngsters. With having a maturity of changing his game according to the situation, Virat has formulated himself as one of the most reliable batsman of the Indian eleven. His aggression at field complements his composure at batting. His protrude feature of batting, sticking out while hitting through the covers is perhaps his best strength on the field. His batting style shows toughness, which is a prerequisite for success; conceivably makes him preferred over the likes of Rahul Dravid and Ross Taylor while choosing squad for IPL.

Whenever I flick through this short career of Virat Kohli, I see a technically perfect batman who steps down to the front foot to play through the cover which reminds me a little master Sachin Tendulkar in him. Front foot drive, back foot punch and remarkable hand eye coordination is very common in between him and Tendulkar. The way he handles pressure situations and upholds his level of concentration is a premonition of brilliance in his batting. Though he is only 22, he is a prolific performer who architected his batting in the same Tendulkar did in his early cricketing life. Someday, this excellent sporting personality will top up for the greatest batsman ever Sachin Tendulkar.