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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
