Wondering if I am doing the right thing, I was waiting on Har Ki Pauri, Haridwar for the Ganga aarti to start. It was six thirty in the evening, the last day of the second week of my summer internship at Patanjali Ayurved Limited. There were still fifteen minutes for the aarti. People were all settled around. They actually started taking their place from five thirty in the evening. Staff members of Ganga association in blue dress had taken their place among those devotees, at equal spaces. All of a sudden, as if by the hint of the drop of a coin, every staff person started pitching for the donation. All in one sync, but all in different words. Every single one of them had their own way of pitching. These were some of the best sales pitch I had heard in my life. I started doubting my own talents. A nine-pointer from IIM Rohtak, trying to understand the consumer behaviour for acquiring new customers for the fastest growing FMCG company, not able to get the responses for his survey, observing and appreciating the pitch of Ganga association staff to get donations.

“What was it that they were doing differently? What was it that I was not able to do? How were they keeping themselves motivated? Perhaps It is the audience that they are pitching to or perhaps it has to do with the fact that they are selling blessings, exactly what the customer wants. In this case, the devotees.” With these questions in the brain, I was going back to Patanjali Yogpeeth Phase 2, but it was not the end. I had taken a local bus from Haridwar to Roorkee that would drop me at Yogpeeth. In short, Phase 2 is where Patanjali has its well-furnished hotels and a common dining area. We were settled in one of them on the fourth floor. So, the bus I had taken took a detour from the local villages and in one of the villages, a salesperson for a pain reliever took the bus. As soon as he took the bus, he started his pitch, “sisters, brothers and elders. I know you have this pain from years.” another sales pitch. The truck conductor was standing outside the bus, trying to woo the customers to take his bus as it would take them faster than the other one. Another sales pitch. A direct attack on a competitor. Suddenly world looked different to me than ever before. It seemed as if everyone was nothing but a salesman.

Observing the world, that day I got my first learning from my internship “Tell the customer what’s there for her in it.” That’s it. That is what everyone wants. And that is what everyone was selling. “What are the benefits?”, is all that matters at the end.

But this is not how and where the story started; it started way back in November of 2017 when I got selected as a summer intern in Patanjali. Or way more precise the journey began in the first week of April, a week earlier than that day at Har-ki-Pauri. Ten of us from IIM Rohtak were selected for the internship there in different domains like marketing, sales, finance, operations, e-commerce and strategy. I was in strategy working under the senior vice-president at Patanjali. On the very first day, he asked me to go in the market in rural and urban areas of western UP and Uttarakhand, do some qualitative survey with customers and retailers and come up with a presentation on the issues I find worth working on. After one week in the villages of UP and Uttarakhand, he finalised my project, asked me to prepare a questionnaire, take the surveys, analyse data and come up with the results. As supportive as a mentor can be, his door was always open for me for any discussion with a weekly Monday morning meeting to review how things were going.

I had prepared my questionnaire in a couple of days after reviewing literature, going again through the qualitative surveys I had taken and talking to my mentor. And that is when the problem started. I was not able to get the responses from the consumers on the field. I was hesitant to go and ask a consumer for fear of getting rejected. In sales, rejection hurts you hard, but fear of rejection hurts you harder. You would gaze at people for hours and imagine if they would buy my product. In my case, if they would fill out my survey.

So, this last day of the second week I went back to Yogpeeth without much success. I knew I was going to face my mentor first thing on Monday without much success. “Should I prepare some responses of my own and tell him that I got these?” but I decided against it. All hail to my mother, my institute and my mentor. The good nature of my mentor helped me hold my ethical grounds. I was sure he would take my failure very positively.

On Monday I met him and told him about my progress with surveys.

“What is a ‘no’ in sales?” he asked me.

“Opportunity,” I said instantaneously, having heard this somewhere.

“Exactly.”

He gave me new targets for my survey, but this time it was something different. He asked me to come back next Monday, and I should come with at least 180 ‘Nos’. That was 30 Nos per day. In the process, any survey filled would be a bonus. I didn’t realise what he did there until I was on the field. He increased my contact rate, as he was aware that my conversion rate was good enough. Suddenly the whole process shifted from my analytical skills to remove my fear of failure. By the end of that week, I was good enough to start a conversation with a random person in the market to fill up my survey.

Things changed rapidly after that. Once I was done with the surveys, I analysed the data and presented my findings by the first week of the second month. And that is when he surprised me with another fact. All but one of my recommendations were already getting implemented at Patanjali. He didn’t stop me at any step just for me to realise the importance of the processes going on rather than just knowing that they are there. He asked me to come up with a detailed structure on the one recommendation which was not being implemented. Simultaneously, he asked me to work in the business intelligence unit to work on the dashboards on Qlik sense as I had told him on the first day that my interests reside in data analytics.

One month down the line, I realise just how much he helped me understand the functioning of a company from the very start of purchasing process to the last point where sales happen. I understood how the strategy starts from the fundamental thing like what would be the growth in my industry in next year, what percentage of the share I want in that market and drilling down to how I would produce, how I would market and how I would distribute. He made me understand the importance of supports like finance, HR and IT in an FMCG company and the importance of managing and analysing the data to get the information that could be utilised for growing. His comments like, “The whole process of data analytics is useless if you cannot utilise the information to add value to the whole process” or “Strategy is not a part of the picture, it is the picture. The strategy is about getting the bird's-eye view of the whole process to understand what’s happening where,” are going to remain with me for a long time, I guess.

As I sit through my courses of Marketing, Strategy and Analytics, I realise how much the subjects have changed since those evenings at the Ganga Ghat, those Monday morning briefings and the tips from a strategy head. Or perhaps the subjects were always the same; It is just the perspective that has changed. And rightly so, because Internship, I guess, is all about changing the perspectives.

aditya aggarwal

Everyone In This World Is Nothing But A Salesman