Empower Your Business with Sales Opportunity Qualification in India

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The main reason I wanted to do an MBA was that I wanted to do a marketing job. In a majority of FMCGs, where maximum marketing jobs are offered, you first have to do a sales role for 2 years. As I didn't know this before, and I ended up getting into a sales role, which is called "Area Sales Manager". I wanted to make this video to help you understand what an ASM does from the start of the day to the end. What are all the tasks he/she does? In total, there are 5 such tasks. I'll also share what are the skills required for these tasks and where can you acquire these skills from? The reason I'm making this video is the information I didn't have, if that gets conveyed to you, maybe you can make a better choice of whether this is a suitable career for you or not. In this video, I'll share what an ASM does but there are many such fields. I won't be able to cover them all. For that, the partners of this video are offering an excellent resource. Expertrons is a platform where you can check which career path will suit you the most. When you log in to their website, you'll find an option to search basis job e.g. area sales manager or you can search basis company e.g. Mondelez you can look for mentors available to connect with. These mentors have shared their journeys interviews and experiences already on this platform. You can watch them. I was very happy to find many of my IIM-A batchmates there in fact, many juniors from Mondelez were also there. So, you can learn about these varied experiences from about 6,000+ experts on this website. TCS, Wipro, Google, Infosys there are many employees from these organizations here which will help you understand what will be the most suitable career path for you. They also offer a dedicated program in which they provide career guidance with 100% placements* you can also explore that I'll add their link to the description and the pinned comment make sure to check it, I hope it helps you! Now, let's discuss what an ASM does. So, I used to start my day around 8 AM, otherwise sales jobs start at 10 AM. Around 8 AM, there's an important task done by all ASMs many of the senior ASMs even do this at 6 AM which is sharing the daily tracker. Sales has a hierarchy. Under an ASM, some sales officers are working further under them, some salesmen are working. A lot of times you must have heard the remark, "Oh you're in sales so do you sell from door to door?" That's not a mangerial job. That's what a salesman does. If I have to explain this in terms of an area, then imagine the state Haryana if we further divide it district wise or population-wise, then we'll get some territories. The person who leads a territory is called a sales officer, they further have their teams of salesmen but the person who leads the sales officers that person is called an ASM. That area's sales manager. i.e. Haryana's Sales Manager. Every sales manager has a target. So, if I am working for Cadbury, then I'll have a sales target for the month for Haryana. I'll further divide it in my team i.e. each Sales Officer will have his own target. Those sales officers will further make their salesmen's targets. As an ASM, my job is to remind the sales officers every morning how much target have they achieved of their monthly target? How much of it is pending? In which all categories of products have they achieved their target? Which all categories are degrowing for them? Which all need to be improved? etc, etc. This can be a large profile I can show you a sample of this tracker. Every ASM makes his own tracker there is no standard format but the main job is the same - to remind your team every morning that what are their top priorities basis target achieved, and target pending. The two skills required for this are data analysis and Excel. Every person should learn these skills there are many resources, you can also learn for free. But, there's an entire library available on YT for this. You can also use it. Other than the basic functions, learn vlookup and pivot table. These two will come in handy. Till 8 AM, I used to share this data. After this, your lovely team of sales officers will start bugging you. There'll be many members of my team watching this they know how much they used to bug me till 12 noon with calls saying these are the problems regarding distributor and order placing, please help. It's not their fault, on a daily basis, they have to place orders. To illustrate this concept, you'll have to understand the distribution of any FMCG. Imagine a company with some products. How do those goods reach the shop near your house? In the middle sits an intermediary and the biggest stakeholder of an ASM which is a distributor. The goods reach from warehouse to distributor and then from distributor to retailers, A distributor cannot place an order regularly. That's because this company warehouse has limited number of vehicles for delivery and they follow a path and supply goods to all the distributors on the way. So in a week, a distributor has only some days on which he can place an order. So, every sales officer wakes up and checks which all distributors are supposed to place an order today so that they can check their stock level and determine if their order is right and recommend in case something is missing. Here, an important point you should know is for any FMCG, the sales from a distributor to retailers isn't important it's instead the sales from warehouse to distributor. So, whenever we say sales target we mean from company warehouse to the distributor. Now this is very important because if an SO/ASM wants to achieve their sales target then they must know which of their distributors haven't placed orders. So when SOs start making their distributors' orders, that's when trouble starts for an ASM because he/she starts getting calls of out of stock goods requests for delivery date change for a distributor requests to arrange the delivery vehicle then the ASM has to talk to distribution teams and get it managed by discussing with the warehouse. The main skill required for this is that of discussion and negotiation. Because you have to manage your sales officers and collaborate with the warehouse teams to ensure that the overall problem gets solved. Along with that, you need some reasoning skills too. Because when you talk to a distributor or a sales officer, they have endless reasons why they're unable to get an order. If you know which question is to be asked by looking at the data, You'll be able to identify where the problem actually lies. This is especially important for freshers like me when you don't know industry knowledge, it's easy to dupe you. For this, I'll recommend you two resources. You learn this the most on-the-job. For this, the senior ASMs of your company who have been in the company for a long time. When you connect with them, they can tell you where exactly SOs are bluffing, there's another book that will help you with persuasion skills. That is How to Win Friends & Influence People. You can read this book, it will help you generally also. Third is field visit. Till 12 this used to get done after that I had to visit the market with distributors or to visit with some of my sales officers. And to see what exactly is happening in the market. So you have to visit shop-to-shop and and check the visibility of your products how are assets/coolers your company has installed in the market, is everything okay in the market, is supply actually reaching there do the salesmen even exist in the market then you'll check a distributor's godown. You'll see if it is stocked properly. Are the cooling systems in place? A lot of things that you have to check, you have to see if everything is working properly or not that you can't do from home. You have to step out in the market. A lot of people may wonder if you have to travel in sales the answer is yes, you have to visit the market. But, 2-3 days a week are sufficient you should basically monitor what is happening in your market it helps with 2 things - 1. consumer insights the shopkeepers may tell or you may observe something that helps the company grow their business 2. you get the leverage to pinpoint the mistakes in distributors next time if an excuse surfaces (my team might actually not like me telling this) if your team makes an excuse, you can tell them what happened in their market and that's how you get that leverage to get things done. For this, the skill required is that of observation that you learn by practice it is not something you can learn by a book. I can recommend you a channel Skill to Will. This channel talks very well about FMCG jobs, I have recommended the videos to those who want to get into sales you can also refer, I'll add link to the description. After the field visit, you get free by 5/6pm. There are two tasks without timing, one of them should be on your to-do all the time. Make sure to note this too. Fourth is the earnings of your team. Your team and extended team of salesmen keep getting notified of contests by the company. A large part of their salary is incentives on achieving targets and these contests. What happens is (and I have massive respect for them) there is so much work to do for them they don't even have the time to figure out how much incentive has been earned, or which all contests are running. As the leader of your team, it's your responsibility to ensure they're earning their incentives well you also have to take care of their growth and development. For example, you should teach them Excel you should train them for interviews of becoming ASM from SO. You should keep checking the growth, earning structure of your team and which contests are running which contests should you win as a team which contests can a particular SO win more likely? You should encourage and update them. That's your responsibility. For this, you should learn people management. For this you should take guidance from senior ASMs they can tell you which contests to run and which ones to skip Fifth is talking to senior management. This is a dangerous task you might be asked to do and is your biggest responsibility. You report to a Branch Manager who has multiple areas under him if your area is not performing well on any parameter be it sales/distribution targets or any complaints from your area or if your team is running behind in any contest then you are answerable and accountable why it is not happening in your area. You need to present numbers, facts, figures, reasons why it is happening. You have to keep the numbers of your area on tips Because of which area are you not able to achieve your targets? Even company shares a product-wise tracker they share data on how is performance of different products in your area vs the other areas so you have to analyze where you're making the mistake or why your team is not performing. You can never give an excuse and put it on your team, you are responsible for it. What are you doing if your team isn't performing? You're always answerable to senior management. So, what is the skill required? You need to analyze data after looking at the tracker. Second use the company softwares on the job. Third and the most important is to learn to handle stress. Sales is a job in which branch managers will put pressure on you and you have to put pressure on your team but you need to learn the skill to not absorb that pressure. You learn this on the job too. I had asked my immediate manager how her sales experience was She told me sales is not everybody's cup of tea, for some it is too stressful. And I told her it's never going to happen to me. But it honestly depends on how you are as a person So now I'll suggest who is suitable for this job. If you are a people person, you like data, observation and can handle stress, then this is the perfect job for you. This is not for those who are creative or like to think out of the box This is more of implementation and gettings things done kind of work. But at the same time the memories you form with your team are priceless. So this is what I wanted to share about ASM. Use the comments if you have any doubt. Thank you so much for watching this guys!