How I got my a#* kicked on the first job ?
And how it made me a better salesman, teacher and parent !
What my first boss taught me about sales & leadership might help you in writing (or for that matter in any other field).
In a hazy bar filled with smoke and cheap Bollywood songs — he shared the this mantra “Contact 100 people, 10 will show interest and finally 1 will get converted. Targeting 100 is obvious; the trick is not to let the toxicity of the subsequent 90 rejections drag you down. This is the100–10–1 rule ".
This sales formula worked well for me — all the 15 years that I worked as a corporate collie. Rest of the article is about the leadership formula ; if you are interested, read on.
I began my first sales job like a textbook noob … had no previous corporate experience, was working in a new city and was in the midst of a relationship that was in a free fall. I was working in Life Insurance company — which anyways is a competitive sector to be in. While co-workers cracked cases day in day out, I was squatting flies sitting in the office canteen.
The boss man, dear Mr. YS, was busy saving his own skin , met once a week for 10 minutes usually to tell me that I was a pulling the team’s productivity down. The months kept whizzing by, I had nothing much to show in any of the sales team meetings, therefore the first job fizzled out like a cheap Chinese cracker on a rainy Diwali night.
In my second job, I was fortunate enough to be working with a boss who mentored the team well. Mr. Joshi took me along during all his sales call. Most of the clients that we met had some or the other objection; it was a grueling work to face the barrage of rejections, sales call after another sales call. If I was working alone , it was at that point that I would have quit — the job and sales all together.
We had been working for about a month now and after finishing another day on the field , as we sat at a shady bar having beers, I asked him how he could go from one meeting to another in face of rejections. As Kishore Kumar sang the blues and the neighboring drunkard vomited dangerously close to our table, he revealed the above mentioned magic formula. The 100–10–1 Golden Sales Ratio.
The waiters rushed to throw the drunkard out — everyone shouted boisterously at the plight of the poor fellow & a warm glow of wisdom dawned on me , like it had on Buddha 2500 years back :
(a) it was not talent — but perseverance that won the day
(b) a great leader not just asks for results — he helps you achieve them, too.
Of course, they had taught me this in management school and it is written in every sales book — but that show and tell lesson that Mr. Joshi taught me was a steady anchor throughout the corporate life.
I teach kids now, after having left corporate life and am a parent to a teenager. Though I keep slipping now and then , I keep reminding myself:
(a) I may repeat a fact 100 times but they will listen to it 10 times only and understand it maybe once.
(b) Anything I need to teach them has to be demonstrated first.
Like all the wise stuff, the power of these two formulas lie in their simplicity. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — ❁ ❁ ❁ — — — — — — — — — — — —
