“Thinking out of the box” is what we get to hear in the corporate and entrepreneurial world these days and when I heard it for the first time, I could only relate it to the “potential in a box” theory taught to us (but never understood by us) as part of quantum mechanics during our Master’s course in physics. Once the course concluded, we felt let out of the box to be free to test our true “potential” and shape our own career path.
Many of my classmates opted for teaching and have done well in their careers, but in retrospect, if I think of the career options I chose, I do not know whether I was “thinking out of the box” back then. I was always fascinated by the impeccably dressed sales executives and medical representatives on the field, and I had imagined that a career in sales is the most lucrative. The prospect of travelling and meeting people made it all the more exciting.
This myth exploded in my first interview in a pharma company as the interviewer made it clear to me that sales job is not a career to fulfil one’s interest in hitch-hiking and gallivanting. He explained to me that sales is not about a “tie around the neck, a bag on the hand and lie from the mouth” (as the adage in Tamil goes, “Kaluthula tie, kaiyila pai, vaayila poi”), and comes with a lot of responsibility.
He advised me that with my background in physics and electronics, I should look for a job in technical sales, if I still wanted to pursue a career in sales.
To add to this, people at home were against a sales career, saying matrimonial prospects for “sales grooms” were the bleakest. Sales jobs were considered “permanently temporary”, they said.
With all these odds, I finally ended up in a job of selling RF, microwaves and satellite products. It was technical selling, travelling pan-India and meeting people and in a sense, it gave me all I wanted.
Travelling was hectic and we had a colleague who would travel every week only to turn up at the office on Mondays and travel again the same evening. One of our customers from the Hindi heartland, a professor in a famous research institute, insisted that I show him where the “Sandhesh Andhar” is on the electronics instrument I was trying to sell, and looking at the bewilderment on my face, he shouted at me, “Where is the signal input?”
Another customer, a popular scientist who had a habit of lacing his conversation with jargon, wanted me to sit alone in his chamber for some time.
“You can enjoy the ‘orthoganality’ of solitary splendour, while I attend the presentation from your competitor,” he said.
While the many sales situations entail us to think differently or “think out of the box”, our lives mostly are lived out of suitcases.
A salesperson not only “thinks out of the box” but also “lives out of the box” often.
sreedharg43@gmail.com
