Who doesn’t like chocolates and one name which resonates the chocolate industry is “Cadbury” and everyone can relate with it more than Mondelez – the company which manufactures Cadbury. Mondelez International Pvt Ltd is a multi-national company which is headquartered in the Chicago. The primary function of the company is to manufacture chocolate, cookies, gum, confectionery, and powdered beverages. I got the opportunity to intern in the Indian subsidiary – Mondelez India Foods Pvt Ltd a.k.a Cadbury.
If you want to crack interview for this company, you need to show zeal towards learning and doing the hard work. The interview consists of concepts which you learnt in your first year. You should also know how a sales department and sales distribution works. If you know the basics you will definitely sail through.
On the first day of my internship, I was extremely excited to go to their Indiabulls office, but there was a catch. All the sales and marketing interns are send to the field from day 1 of their internship. It’s the best exposure you can get being in the sales and marketing domain because sooner or later you will have to do the on field work. The company gave me an opportunity to learn about sales and distribution management with regular market visit and interaction with team members at different levels of the organisation in Mumbai Central Area. It provided a platform to understand about its product portfolio and various SKU’s.
The duration of internship was 2 months and was divided into several parts. The first part included introduction of new Retail Distributor in Central Mumbai region. As you complete the first year, you hardly have any practical experience. I went from reading about distribution channels in books to actually experiencing it. We had to increase the confidence of the retailers in the new distributor and make the process of delivery of the products faster. The day would end in taking out numbers of the sales of every salesman and determining their productivity. You would run from one store to another and convince them that the company has them on priority and we are there for any grievances they are facing. The retailers took our word and started ordering from the new distributor.
In the second part of the internship, I moved towards increasing the productivity of the retail outlets and opening new retail outlets. This was done to so as to understand and improve the distribution track of Cadbury. I carried out research analysis for Cadbury retailers with the aim of understanding that if retailers are happy with the service provided by the company and how many retailers are not keeping the Cadbury products and what is the reason for not keeping it. Primary research was done and the data was collected with the help of a questionnaire and interaction with the Retailers with a sample size of 300. Analysis was done using excel and new targets were set for the retailers in turn increasing the sales for that particular month. And if you complete the monthly targets set by the company, you would be rewarded with sweet goodies.
In course of 2 months, I worked in different sections of Cadbury network such as getting the product requirement, billing and sending the goods across to various retailers. There were times during crisis situation that you and the salesman would go and pitch Cadbury products to the retailers. The internship period just went by in visiting different areas of Mumbai and interacting with various retailers, customers, distributor and salesman.
This internship wouldn’t have been such a great experience if I didn’t have the support of my company manager Mr. Swapneel Bhagwat and my company guide Ms. Shruti Kamath. Both of them were by my side to help me understand the business model of Cadbury and how actually a sales profile works. They also let me take initiatives and come up with different line of thought. In the end it was a perfect sales internship.