Thursday 9 August 2007

a city called aizawl

people have always said that the north east is extremely beautiful... i got the full force of that in aizawl... beautiful beautiful place... nice and green and high atop hills, it aint too high so ur not feeling too cold, the mornings are slightly nippy, but the rest of the day is quite pleasant...

aizawl for those who need a geography refresher is the capital of mizoram... and the lietracy rate exceeds kerala, a mindboggling 90% sorts... all english medium (mizo is written in english script)...

oh and the most interesting part is to come... you see more women on the streets than men, it is the women who are shopkeepers and thery converse in english...

for most fmcg companies it is a almost virgin territory, nobody has explored it to the full and im guessing im the first management trainee to ever set foot there... loadsa work to do and a brilliant place to do it...

oh, and did i say it, money aint the last of worries, the economy aint particularly down, the rich are extremely rich and you have showrooms of every major brand there...

so the crux is getting the goods down to the right guy...

but its not as if there are no problems... the catches include problems similar to a lot of the north east... bandhs and strikes and the rest... and the terrain isnt exactly the most suited for travel... distributors hav to at times go to places, stay overnight and then move back... issues galore...

Monday 6 August 2007

a flight to aizawl...

this tour seemed totally jinxed but i stayed on it... the next morning got up bloody early to go to the airport... turns out the aizawl flight is delayed too... 2 hrs...

01.00 pm

speak to adi and wish her a very happy budday, the girl is extremely surprised that i called from exotic places... :)

01.30 pm

tech snag discovered on the flight, engineering team called in from cal to fix it... cal will take 2 hrs to gather people up and then sned them here through a flight gingto jorhat which will land at guwahati just to drop these guys off ... (yeah right... i wud have even believed airdropped them, but special focus on customer needs - no way, not with indian in North East)...

03.30 pm

discover that if the team fixes everything by 3.45 pm the flight can take off, after it is discovered that it cannot be fixed in 15 mins after para dropping the engineers and materials (for which the inspection will happen at 4.00pm ??? ) a message will be sent to cal asking permission to cancel the flight... then once the chai pakoda at the calcutta canteen gets exhausted (its raining people - chai pakoda has the highest priority)... then the flight will be cancelled...

05.30pm

get tickets cancelled and get back to hotel...

07.30 pm

go out for pizza!!! aaah!!!

next morning 07.30 am.. get up and run...

and by the way, i misplace my tickets to aizawl and the flight i know is totally full from the passengers of 2 days...

09.30 am

my colleague smooth talks the airport manager into accepting that i am indeed me and am not carrying false copies of driving license, passport, pan card and atm card with my photos on... i then but a frsh ticket costing rs 2000 for the same seat on teh same name on the same flight... grrr :( but at least im going to aizawl...

a flight to catch at agartala

ok, this has taken a long time coming.....

life has moved a lot since that smelly day at agartala. I am currently in Silchar, posted here as he sales officer covering south assam, north tripura and mizoram (quite a huge territory size wise).

let me take this in chronological order since the last post...

I finished off a rather useful assisted sales officer stint in agartala and was to go to guwahati for my monthly meeting... was booked on the 5 pm flight from agartala to guwahati... at about 2, the helpful (at least thats what i tht abt them then) people from Indian called to say the flight had been delayed by 2 hrs sorts... hmmm ok.... so we reach the airport at 6 (my sales officer - trainer and yours truly) and find out that the flight has been delayed further to 8... well, now im sure something off is going to happen...

7.15 pm

the boarding happens and we're all in the flight when the pilot informs us (at least thats whom i think gives out the info about impending crashes and delays and all that) that the flight is delayed due to the presence of thunderclouds over guwahati... ok.. waiting for them to clear off...

8.15 pm


the announcer (im using the word since i havent ascertained who he/she really is) announced that the flight cant go to guwahati because of some union issue about working overtime on a rainy night... i mean what the heck, here we are all waiting to get to guwahati and the union decides to go on a sudden strike or whatevr protesting long working hours on monsoon nights... brilliant, absolutely brilliant...

8.45 pm

some arrangements have been made with union about the late nights work that they have to put in on the rainy night instead of sipping hot tea and eating garam pakodas, but however, agartala has soem electricity problems now and all the lights in the airport complex go out, im sitting in a plane in pitch darkness about 100 m from the bangladesh border... grrrr.....

9.15 pm

send us all back to the terminal and sent the baggae back.. unfortunaltely the official communication to the airport staff hasnt happened and although we're all deboarded and sitting in the lounge but cant leave the airport since the flight hasnt been cancelled officially and the staff wont cancel the tickets... brilliant...

9.45 pm

now the cal authorities who had gone to get their cup of chai and pakodas are back and are kind enough to inform the agartala airport that the flight indeed has been cancelled and will now take off at 5 pm 2 days later

what!!! i lost my head, i might as well not go since im only going to completely miss the meeting...

10.00 pm

after some franctic haggling with the airport staff, wiggle out the fact that the flight will now go to cal (remember all along that this is an ATR - not those huge boeings or airbuses most of u r accustomed to) and passengers can go to cal on a first come first serve basis (whatver happened to te good old days when airlines considered caring for you)

10.15 pm

get an sms from my asm that his flight from cal to guwahati has been cancelled and he the meeting will hopefully start the enxt afternoon...

10.20pm

get on board the cal flight

12.20 am

reach cal airport but am seriously confused if its the airport or howrah station, the ac is obviously not working and people are asleep all over the floor on blankets, newspapers, whatever...

01.00 am

wiggle out a room at the cal airport that is reserved for some god knows who at a princely sum of rs 800 per head (the god part about cal is that it doesnt cost too much to get around hings)...

07.30 am

get to the security line, waiting to get boarding passes...

07.45 am

see asm coming in to the queue and pass on his ticket to my colleague whos standing way ahead in the line - its one of those long railway station lines types, about 30 people on it... find out that although my colleague and i will get boarding passes, my asm has no room on the flight.... grrrr..... so long meeting...

07.50 am

asm gets upgraded to business class (hey i wanted that).... and we get on to guwahati for the meeting....

but wait, thats only one part of the story.. next part in the next post...

Monday 18 June 2007

and the flipside....

this birth-year for me has had one of the worst starts....

for one, on my birthday, agartala recieves what seems to be 1 meter of rainfall... its raining cats and dogs all day and all internet and landlines are dwon, i mean what is a guy supposed to do in a condition like this... and friends and family cant get through because all the networks are clogged.... its real frustrating....

but thats still forgivable compared to the second day..

today is i think the lowest day of my professional career... forgive me my friends, i am a vegetarian, and a tam-bram at that, and for me to e selling horlicks all day in a fish (both fresh - whatever that means, and dry, and various states of drying), plus all forms of poultry and goats and sheep and cattle and the butchers alone know what else in one of the forementioned various states of drying are some of my worst olfactory nightmares...

i spent an entire day of selling horlicks and the rest of the assortment and putting up posters and POPs and backing sheets and what not in that atmosphere... and to top it all off, i had two new products to explain in bengali (readers may be reminded that im ok with a variety of languages even though i am tam bram, i can manage hindi, english, tamil and a mixture of haryanvi-punjabi) and had to use words like shonga -shonga, khhob bhalo chale, nutan product and the rest of my limited bengali vocabulary to explain things - oh by the way i didnt mention this, agartala folks dont speak bengali but a dialect which even my bengali HR manager cant get....

that means 4 hours of talking, running out of the market to get a couple of gasps of fresh air, and then back in in time to complete the pitch...

to say i lost it is an understatement, the mixture of smells got into my head and i totally lost it today... i ran out, i just couldnt stand there, and think about a poor vegetarian salesman/ sales officer in that situation, whew... i really really really feel for that guy man... its terrible...

i came out of the market alll pukey and all and tried to wash down the feeling with a pepsi... but the damn pepsi was EXPIRED STOCK... have u guys ever heard of expired pepsi??? well i got one and it tasted totally horrible and worsened my condition, i just could continue with the beat and took a rickshaw back to thee distributor's office to get my body to a better shape....

whew, that would by far be down as the smellist day of my career...

thanx a ton for all the birthday wishes....

its amazing spending ur birthday in a place like agartala, disconnected from the rest of the world...

for a lot of people trying to contact you, its a difficult, nay almost impossible thing coz they have no clue where u are and the last number they had does not work...

and u spend a normal day in your hotel room, just like the day before that and the one before that, there's no one to meet and no partying to do, not even a cup of coffee available here...

the downsides of sales :( ...

Friday 15 June 2007

my first day at agartala....

landing at the agartala airport, the scenery absolutely takes u aback, i mean the place is so ultimately green and small and pretty, for a moment, u feel uve landed in a time warp....

and then the first signal i see on my phone is Grameen Phone - the airport has a stronger reception from Bangladesh than from india - its amazing, i was later told, the other side of the airport boundary wall is basically bangladesh....

on the way here, the atr gave me glimpses of bangladesh - as i said it was flying that low, yes....
the place was totally flooded and green, it was like amazing... and the auto journey to the hotel was absolutely beautiful...

i then landed in a small, nay micro sized hotel called hotel plaza in a densely packed street called masjid street... the hotel had rooms on the first floor and i was booked into a room that cost me a princely sum of Rs 165/- per night, taxes included (please wait a while for the photos).... spent the rest of the evening looking for an atm and then staring at the idiot box...

got up nice and early on moday to go to my distributors' office, found the SO waiting there for me, after a brief 5 minute intro, i was out onto the first beat - Battala...

Battala is short for Bat (sounds exactly like but) - tala (as in the hindi word for lock) is the area around it, and around it was a market that was filled with shops, a total of over 70 counters in a beat lenght of about 2 km max....

went around each store observing what my SO was doing and noting down the orders for the day...

I havent mentioned it before, but its a different thing to be a horlicks company (as gsk-ch is popularly know) sales guy, we're so much more respected than the rest of the world, its absolutely amazing... the level of push sales in this company is probably the least, the products move well and or job is to get the right products at the right place, of course at the right time too, sonds jargonish, but what it means is check the movement of goods in the store, and then decide what to sell, coz its our resposibility if the products dont move from the store, so u see much lesser old/ damaged stock than a lot of other companies... and it means retailers respect u for that...

and so back to our storyline... finished the beat at around 2:00, when the shopkeepers start going back to lunch and a nap.... when it started pouring cats and dogs... hng back in a shed sorts waiting for the rain to abate but no such luck...

caught a closed rickshaw - an agartala special contraption thats fully covered, almost like an autorickshaw, but using leg power... and headed for some lunch - which wasnt brilliant, but expensive nevertheless - there's a huge supply problem here in the northeast...

then came back to the distributor point for a quick tallying of the days work with the other salesmen... and for some reporting to the boss in guwahati...

then headed back to the idiot box...

Thursday 14 June 2007

all in a day's work....

the life of a sales officer more or less goes in a big whoosh...

it starts of with the distributor point... you go there in the morning, check the stocks, check damages, broken stuff, yesterdays sales and returns, quality issues if any (like an improper seal or whatever, any old stock, whatver else)....

then u go and plan ur day, make the daily targets for each of the salesmen... pick a beat to hit, then go meet retailers basically the most of the day...

at the retailers, check the stock movement check if there are any non-moving stock and try to rotate it... put up your pops, check competition moves and report it to your boss if there's anything significant...

then clean and wipe the bottles, packs, etc, clean the shelf and redisplay the product (usualy the salesman does all this even if u start, he'll take over)...

in the meanwhile show the new prodcuts and offers, push new prodcust and keep the retailer from ordering more non-moving stock of his...

this more or less repeats the whole time during the day... of course one is constrained by the fact that indian retailers sleep in the afternoon, so all this needs to be done by about 2...

then come back to stock point, do the totals for the day, make some creatives for the next and plan the next day...

assess the day's performance and fill up some reports...

give feedback to the salesmen...

go back and hit the bed, a tired soul....

to wake up the next morning