In the first two weeks, I did sales job, operations work, and sometimes volunteered to do labour work of moving crates. In the sales job, I traveled with sales executives for two weeks to understand the sales role and the customers. After visiting more than 100+ provisional stores, 50+ restaurants, 50+ pushcarts, and 20+ supermarkets, I got an overall understanding of the customers expectation. Computerized data won't tell that restaurants need bigger onions, and the retailers prefer mid-sized onions. Therefore, my experience in the field was a great learning experience.
My day starts at 4:30 AM when I wake up and go to the market to check the wholesale prices of all the SKU. Once I collect the prices, I report those prices to the city manager. At 5:30 AM a hurdle is conducted either by my city manager or by me. I go with any of the SE on the field, and we return to the room at 7 PM. During sales, I also had the opportunity to handle operations issues like delayed delivery, unpicked customers, returns monitoring, and OTP issues. After 9 PM, I, along with the city manager, look at the data and create a sales plan for the following day.
The above cycle was redundant until my reporting manager, who is the Chennai City Head, flew down to Vellore. I was lucky to share my room with the City Head, and most of our talks were related to business. Few days I stopped going to the field so that I can stay in the room and get some valuable information from him. But still, I tracked sales executives from my room. Everything was going well until a few sales executives resigned for personal reasons. My City Head gave me the responsibility to hire sales executives, and I was very fortunate to get such a level of power. But hiring was not an easy task at all that too, especially for a sales role. Since I liked working with numbers, I was given the responsibility of publishing reports. Because I am publishing the reports for the Chennai Zone, I was added to all WhatsApp groups, and Deepak, who is part of the Project team, introduced me to all the area sales manager. This was a great blessing to me that I was quickly known to many of the managers. Apart from my company's business, I talked with my mentor about VC investments, farming business, PnL of a company, and even about his college life.
With no written working time, no dress code, partying together, and freedom to call anyone at any time in the company, I experienced a complete start-up culture in my company. When my friends in other firms were doing market research for product development, I was feeding the Vellore city with fruits and vegetables. This is something that I can always say proudly to anyone. I made one mistake in my job, which I regret from the bottom of my heart. When I was hiring for a sales executive post at my company, I rejected many applications just because the candidates were aged. I realized my mistake when I came home and saw my dad losing his job because of COVID 19. I missed a few dedicated and talented people like my father for that post just because I had a prejudice that 40+ people won't adapt to sales executive posts.
In April, I was sitting at home and watching people suffering due to the recession caused by COVID 19. I was helpless and I couldn't do anything. Ninjcart gave me the right opportunity to supply fruits and vegetables to hundreds of people in Vellore. It also gave me a reasonable stipend amount so that I can help my father and a few of my friends who have lost their job.
Rahul VG is a first year student at IIM Kozhikode. He hails from Tamil Nadu and has experience with TATA Elxsi. He is an economics enthusiast and is a member of the Konquest committee at IIMK. He is described as enthusiastic and well informed by his batchmates.
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