Nobody told me sales would start at 9 AM on the back of a bike, in the rain.
My first week in Calicut, I showed up at Vijaya Marketing — the distributor point where I did my first stretch of training — expecting a desk and a laptop. Instead I was told to “get familiar” with the SKUs- it’s blasphemous to confuse brands in consumer goods. What I didn’t know was that “familiarity” meant profiling over 500 SKUs, from our 4 groups of business- Dets, Foods (+1), and PP. It was like inventory but worse, had to go around the warehouse noting down SKU, grammage, price, CLD rate- number of packs in one carton. It was hot sweaty and just, new. One day later, I introduced to an ME (the only one who’d learnt some Hindi watching Bollywood movies), handed a helmet, and told we were doing his entire beat before the morning showers picked up. Kerala rain doesn’t warn you. We hit Silk Street by 9, ponchos half-on, cartons covered in plastic before they’d even left the bike. By 9.30, I’d watched him walk into a shop, greet a retailer he’d known for six years, glance at the shelf without really checking it, and take an order in under ninety seconds.
I asked him why he didn’t do a stock check first. He said the ones he was close with, he already knew what they needed. It wasn’t laziness. It was a relationship shortcut built over years (and well I think it happened to cost him lines he could’ve sold, but what do I know).
That was the first crack in what I thought sales was. I’d walked in picturing it as execution — hit the target, tick the box, move to the next outlet. What I actually found was something closer to a hundred small, ongoing negotiations, each shaped by history I had no access to on day one. A retailer telling an ME “if you push more lines I’ll take my order elsewhere” wasn’t a training gap. It was two people who’d been reading each other for years, and the ME choosing not to spend the trust he had on something small.
I did this every day for weeks — different ME, different beat, same rhythm. Ride out through the wet streets, watch someone I was still a stranger to walk into shop after shop and manage a relationship in real time, then ride back to the RS point to watch the same order become a bill, a truck, a delivery. Somewhere in there I stopped thinking of the outlets as data points. There was the pharmacy owner who’d only order in cash because a cheque had bounced on him once, years before I was born. There was the wholesale shop where the ME didn’t even try to push new SKUs because he already knew the answer, and pushing anyway would just cost him goodwill for the next visit. Every one of those “reasons” would eventually look like a clean row in a spreadsheet back at HUL. Standing in the shop, they were just people making sense of risk the way anyone would.
I’d assumed the hard part of sales was the math. It’s not. The math is the easy part — anyone can read a target. The hard part is that every single number on that sheet is downstream of somebody’s trust, somebody’s bad experience from five years ago, somebody’s calculation about what they can afford to lose today. Nobody put that in the onboarding deck. You only find it by getting on the bike.