The end is near

Recently I came across a very interesting and rather an accurate definition of the biggest foul four lettered word ever formed - “BOSS”. It read “Boss is a person who thinks that nine women together can produce a child in one month”. I don’t know if this is true about all Bosses but it definitely holds its ground as far as all the Sales-superiors are concerned.

When you join any big organization, you are all excited, brimming with confidence, determined to make a difference to the organization, blah blah blah. After being six months in the organization, only the “blah blah blah” remains. The induction programme where they teach you all the Visions, Missions, Goals, Values, Compliance, Policies and so on are all replaced by a single word “TARGETS”. The selection of the word ‘targets’ is a very strategic one in the field of sales. It has a dual meaning; target is something you need to achieve if you do not wish to become the target of your boss’ fury.

There are a few fundamental relationships that exist any sales job:

ü The percentage of target to be achieved is inversely proportional to the time left for achieving the same.

ü The amount of pressure applied by the BOSS is exponentially directly proportional to the targets left to be achieved.

ü The number of customers not available on account of ill health, foreign visits, family deaths etc increases with every decreasing day of sales.

Amidst all these adversities and problems, life of a salesperson is truly one to admire. Every BOM (beginning of month - for all you non-sales people) brings new hopes, new aspirations and the same gets shattered with every month-end. There is a reset button in life of every sales person which gets pushed on 1^st of every month. Whether last month was brilliant or pathetic holds no relevance, especially when it was brilliant, in a sales job.

I am not a veteran of the field called ‘sales’ till date, but from whatever experience I have had in the field, I have discovered some very important facts. First discovery is that the fantasy character of Werewolf has been inspired by a character which we all deal with in our daily lives – BOSS. The full moon day is nothing but the Month-end, when the beast within the boss gets unleashed to torment our lives and take away our sleep. Another discovery is that however good a performer you are, your boss will always find scope of improvement in your performance. Now, I myself am a believer of the fact that Nobody is perfect, but what surprises me is that whoever your boss is, whatever his qualifications are, whichever kind his nature is, he is always capable enough of finding that one scope of improvement in you every time. If you have done brilliant sales, he will know that you are not in touch with all your customers. If you are in touch with the customers, he will know that you are not well verse with company processes. If you take care of that too, he will know that you come to office fifteen minutes late. By the time you try to improve on all these factors, your precious sales time is lost and you are back to square one. I don’t know if this is a talent which gets developed in the training or it is an inbuilt quality that you acquire as soon as you lead a team.

Being in the banking sector, I have made one observation regarding my organization. The higher you are in the hierarchy in any sales organization, the lesser you know about the markets, the worse your sales skills are and the maximum of targets you expect to be achieved in the running month. I am not making these comments in air. I have concrete examples to prove my case. When financial industry was going under a severe recession, when the revenue stream to be earned via entry load in mutual fund was abolished, when the ULIP plans reduces commission because IRDA mandated them to do so, THAT WAS exactly when the top management increased sales team targets as they thought there is lot of opportunity to poach customers from other financial organizations (they think their brand is immune to these news and others are just shutting down post the news).

I am not complaining about my job, I know that everyone would like to add a suffix of “blow” in front of their job to describe it aptly. However, I just want to ask my BOSS and maybe his BOSS or maybe all the BOSSES in the world. What is up with this month-end? It is not as if the world is ending. It is not as if you may not live to sell another day, so might as well make the most of today. I have never understood the concept of this month-end. Even if I have over-achieved my targets, my boss will say ‘month-end hai bhai, kitna karega’. Why can’t they have month-mids or month-starts? One of the sidey shahrukh khan movies has a dialogue which interprets in English as “ Life is like a film, it always has a happy ending and if there is no happy ending it means that the film is not done yet.” After analyzing the phenomenon of month-ending, I did not find this statement apt, after all, what was so happy about this month-ending. But then I realized that the statement was truly apt, the end is nowhere in sight. The month-end takes reincarnation every month J.

I also want to ask another question, if I am supposed to attend the morning huddle for an hour, the evening huddle for another hour, provide detailed tracker of monthly numbers I have achieved and plan to achieve thrice a day, assist colleagues as we are TEAM PLAYERS, report to the counselor, the regional head, the service head, the product team, the product expert of all product lines, when am I supposed to do SALES? And all these activities increase exponentially with the end nearing (read: month-end).

There is one more aspect that I want to make clear. YOUR INSPIRATIONAL STATEMENTS DON’T INSPIRE. The kind to pep talks that these bosses give is unbelievably humorous and definitely not motivating. I cannot do anything else but quote some of them and leave it on the readers to decide which one is the funniest:

ü Don’t sell the apple, sell the crunch (and I thought I was selling Financial products)

ü I have full faith in this team. Now tell me how the hell will we achieve the numbers? (Some faith that is!)

ü You have a bright future ahead, if only you can survive this pressure month (as if this is the only pressure month of the century)

ü The superiors are tracking your every move. Make sure you don’t let them down. (am I some internationally wanted criminal? Am I on GPRS? Am I atleast on CCTV?? Damn, nobody is tracking me L)

ü You do these numbers for me and I’ll make sure I talk positive about you in the next regional meet. (Otherwise you bitch about me?? And btw, you don’t have any other interesting topic to discuss in the regional meet?)

ü I have high hopes from you, don’t let me down.

ü After a week: I had high hopes from you, you let me down. (How was I involved in you having and then not having high hopes)

ü Next Month: I have high hopes from you,……… (Damn, this guy never learns from his mistakes)

I can go on and on with this stuff, but I guess I have driven home the point. I personally do not have any issues with the month ending nor beginning neither do I wish to change the calendar system so wisely developed over a period of time. The only point I am trying to make is that it’s just another day. MONTH-END is not end of business, not end of career (hopefully), not end of client-relationship, it is just end of a MONTH. Jeeeeeeez, how hard is it to understand this?

I know that you people are worried what will happen to me if my boss reads this, but as Salesman Rocketsingh says “Risk to Spiderman ko bhi lena padta hai, Main to phir bhi Salesman hu!!!”

Anyways, I think I won’t be able to find much time as the end is near now, yes, the month-end. SO, to all of you, HAPPY ENDING!!!