look inside to sell outside

What are job interviews? How difficult they are when you are just starting off?

I remember my first job interviews. It always work when you are confident and you get into the room thinking I don’t really care what happens after this interview. That’s the way you max your interview. You simply tell yourself you don’t need this. but there is a caveat. In the middle of my career I was so high on this that I went into interviews and possibly came across as an arrogant prick. Who wants an arrogant prick?

The key to an interview is not all this – but simply being earnest and sincere. You have to go in confident about yourself. Of course you can’t behave that you want the job, cause that will turn the other guy into an ‘employer’. You want him to turn into a position where he believes that you can actually change his business for him. That’s what I think worked the best for me. I stumbled upon this by chance one day. I was interviewing because I thought I could use a higher pay but not because I wanted the job. So I went and then in the middle of the interview, I asked him about his issues and then tried to explain to him why it won’t work with his current approach and how he could improve. That was the first interview that I think I did exceedingly well. Now I try and convert my interviews into meetings. Friendly meetings where I am trying to genuinely learn about the interviewer and his business. Hopefully we can depart after having an intelligent conversation. That is the best thing to be gained from an interview.

Of course you lose the ones that you have pricks on the other side who think they know it all and wouldn’t be less bothered if their business plan bombed in their face. You don’t want to work with them at all. I like to say a simple thing like you try and play to your strengths because if you do get the job you like to get a job that rewards your strengths. This is actually the best strategy. But try telling that to someone who needs a job change desperately. That one wants to be all the interviewer wants him to be. Then it’s the simple thing of being a great sales man.

I remember some lectures / professors from school. Sometimes you don’t know what made an impact in your life. It takes so much time to know what was the best advice you ever received or the best lecture you ever attended. This one I am referring to my sales professor in b school. It’s a pity that I don’t remember his name.  He started his lecture with a  simple truth – he asked us – what is the most thing that motivates a sales man. After ten minutes of answers that we farted out – the answer came from Cherian – who said – money. I remember the prof calling him and shaking hands with him. That’s it – Money. The other one thing he taught me was that amongst the best thing that a sales man will have is motor mimicry. I am not sure if I get this term right but basically – he talks about the sales man to imitate the prospect. He copies the body language and tonality and almost every mannerism.

On Saturday I was teaching some of this stuff to the kids at college and I distilled my experience in to two words that I thought was very cool. Enthusiasm and Empathy. He first needs to be enthu about his product that he is selling and that has to be translated to the prospect. Only if he is enthusiastic about the product then only is he able to transfer his enthusiasm, because so many times what are we buying? Everything is so similar to each other and there is little differentiation between products and services. And this is especially important if there isn’t a packaged product that we are buying. So we just go by the basic feel of the sales man we are talking to. His enthusiasm is what sells.

Empathy is the foundation of the mimicry that he does. A good sales man is one who feels deeply about his prospect. While he is genuinely enthu about his product, he is also concerned about the prospects life and his needs and his deep unstated / stated desires. This is what makes him want to understand the prospect and then on this understanding is where the enthu builds and BAM… Sales.

This is the same technique in an interview. Genuine enthusiasm about your product or service (Self-confidence) meets Deep empathy (right banter). This is an unstoppable force. I think in many ways Malcolm Gladwell also agrees with me. See below

Free bonus video, the wordings of which are possibly apt for the blog I wrote. It’s a weird connection. I am not saying be selfish but be matlabi in a nice way. There is a niceness inherent in you that you have to harness to get your sales pitch right!

Matlabi, ho zhara matlabi…. I love the song in any case… its got a lovely ring to it!

football!

Oh man the football world cup is here. One of the things that I really miss by not having cable TV is the Football world cup.

I was in Dubai till I was about 8 years old. The national sport of the Emirates is Football. Of course we immigrants would be crazy about cricket but football was well promoted. And to add  - my brother was great at football and loved playing it. So football was an important sport. Then we came to India and we enrolled ourselves in Don Bosco. Being a catholic school run by priests – the favorite sport they played was – yes you guessed it – football. Football was seen as a more prestigious sport than cricket and the super stars were not the ones in the cricket team but the ones in the football team. This was in spite of the fact that the famous Indian cricketer Ravi Shastri was an aluminous of the school and had led the school to victory in the prestigious Giles shield. Cricket was meant for sissies.

I tried to get into the football team and I think just because I was the brother of a good player – the rector in charge took me in the B team. I practiced for a few days only to fall ill. It was monsoon and I would fall ill every monsoon and so I never did get to play serious football. Though I do think that I would have sucked at it. I liked to play defender and I would see myself charging at the ball and throwing myself at it. I liked to slide and tackle. The muck was so much that you just slide and even if you missed the ball completely and knocked the striker out, nobody really cared. The game was completely on who was ready to get muckier than the other.

So I never did get to play too much football even though I loved the sport. That was a really bad thing and so I naturally moved on to other sports and qualified for basketball. It was a weird reason that I moved to basketball. There was an essay that we had to write in the seventh standard on a sport and I was still hung over the “I grew up abroad thing” and I wrote about playing basketball and baseball, though I never did play the sport. And then… one day we wanted to field a team and a senior came to the classrooms asking or players. I put my hand up. We were called for trials and were taught a few basics of the game. After this they held a small trial where they asked us all to run up dribbling to the net and throw a ball. I remember mine going in for a basket. And boom – I was in the school team. After this we got some better training from one of the seniors who was a basketball fanatic and we improved. We had one guy from US in the school, one Indian whose parents tried to experiment with coming back. He was the only genuine player. I think his name was Sameer. The others were simply in and around him. We played on the full size court and then before the match, we were told that we would be playing on the smaller courts with smaller balls. Junior basketball. We played against the school called Ahmed Sailors they were the reigning champions and were rumored to field over age players. We lost our first game pretty bad. No one really did give us a chance. I don’t remember but we did get a few balls inside. We didn’t even know the rules completely. I remember getting a foul for taking too much time to throw the ball from outside and once for cutting the line while throwing in. It was a disaster!

But it was enough to fool myself that I am a basketball player and I lived that lie enough for the next few years to be amongst the better players around. Enough to be good enough for the interclass teams, which is also not a bad deal in a school that prides itself on sports. As far as football is in consideration – I must have played one or two interclass matches, as a defender. I think I was so bad that I would play in one half and then play in another. Pappu footballer.

My next stint with football was in intercorportae matches. As in cricket; its not about skill set but more to do with being young and energetic – basically fit enough to run around. Once while I was in Star TV I played one day for their team in a seven a side match. I quickly realized that the game. There was no offside. Which is a great game changer as far as football is considered. All you have to do is hang around the goal. In effect you need attack and then defense. You don’t need a midfield. Seven a side matches are played on smaller grounds and have kick ins from the outside line. We had one champion striker. So I rallied the team to ensure he gets the ball, from any angle. My role in the team was to kick the ball to him. I kept giving him high lobs for him to convert. We won our matches on the first day but my kicking style along with my bakwaas shoes ensured I was with a broken toe nail by the end of the day. So the next day I wasn’t there and we lost. From what I heard of the guys – I thought we lost on strategy more than anything else.

Other football matches I played in were other corporate matches. Again the only reason I might be taken in was because I was fit enough to run / kick. These used to be played during the monsoon and the grounds used to be full of muck. I used to keep falling all the time. You try and kick the ball and whoosh – you are staring at the sky.  It was a terrible ordeal. Till one day I decided to buy football studs. Then on my life improved dramatically, but I think I only played one tournament before my knee gave way and I don’t have the courage to play anymore.

Talking about football studs – my brother played in the school team and hence had studs. But that was another story altogether. In 1984/85 India was a ridiculously poor country and the football studs were made of wood. Yes. These were called wooden studs and were nailed to the shoes. If you were rich would you buy rubber studs.  My poor brother must have had quite an ordeal coming in from Dubai and then wearing wooden studs for the game. I think I have worn them on one occasion and yes – they were painful. Especially since the nails would pass through the insoles thanks to the extensive use. Many years later one sports salesman at a store told me that they looked like wood but were actually made of hard leather. Whatever. The nails were iron for sure.

So now I have a pair of studs in my cupboard that serve no real purpose. I don’t know what to do with them. I hate to throw them away but I know I will never be able to use them. Will have to throw them for sure. Sigh. And as far as the world cup is concerned. I will have to see the updates on google and figure. What else?

Just for the record – I have always loved the German football team.

office wars

I came across this amazing para from this source. http://cheeptalk.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/inside-story-saddams-strategic-thinking/
"Saddam lived in fear of a coup mounted by the Republican Guard. His solution was to create the Special Republican Guard, whose main remit was to protect him against coups particularly from the Republican Guard. You would think that the head of this outfit would be a fearsome figure who would terrify any budding coup plotters. Woods asked other leading figures if this was indeed the case and the answer was a resounding NO! Why? Saddam was well aware of the “who monitors the monitor problem” – what is the head of the Special Guard mounted a coup himself? Saddam’s solution was not original: appoint a relative. Make sure the appointee is a coward so he would not dream of mounting a coup. Just in case he is tougher than you might think, choose someone stupid so he cannot mount a successful coup and is too stupid to recognize someone else’s good ideas for a coup."

I see this happening in corporate life as well; when an insecure though seemingly smart head has an amazingly dumb guy as his side kick. Many times this amazingly dumb guy is a guy from his same caste and village. Thick caste / language loyalties substitute blood loyalties as the latter can be easily accused of nepotism.

Look around you. There are Saddam’s everywhere. One way to look at it his fate is - look at where Saddam is now, the other way is – look at how far he went.

compassion

While we get to see a lot of pretense we rarely get to see any amount of genuine compassion. We will see a lot of passion or I would like to call it misplaced aggression, but compassion is in short supply. I am always moved by acts of compassion but to incorporate genuine compassion is so difficult. It’s sometimes so funny to see a lot of people get so moved by dead cows, dead kitten and dead dogs etc on the road but would have no qualms eating it…. hahaha its so bloody funny. Compassion my ass….
No, don’t get me wrong here. I am nowhere near compassion as I would like to be. Or would dream to be. I guess many times I like the laws of nature to take their own course. I try not to interfere with it. Let not compassion interfere in what nature has held out. But ya, I try and help if I can. But to actually understand what compassion means is to meet two of the finest individuals god has produced. One – Prem Sundar Narayan, two Rajesh Shadevan. It is thanks to sheer luck that I have come in contact with these gentlemen. These two by sheer force of their nature have changed me in more ways than one. Their ability to touch, heal, change the very people they meet. Their ability to ---I don’t know how to put this ---- subjugate themselves and yet retain themselves is outstanding. Their greatness in their ability to rise without meaning to, or even wanting to. It is by no mean a co incidence that they the best – the very best – brand strategists I know of. For, to understand the brand one has to understand the consumer, and to understand the consumer it is important to have genuine compassion for him and genuine empathy. Only if you are able to feel genuinely will you make a great brand promise and great brand delivery. Which bloody B school / prof will explain compassion as a prerequisite for strategy? Only compassion will let you see beyond your own mind shit and your own preconceived notions of what the consumer wants, needs or feels. So much time is spent by kids trying to figure out brand strategy with a lot of shit and shat thrown in, but people doesn’t realize to be a great brand strategist one needs to be an outstanding human being. Care must be your core virtue for it to translate outward. CARE CONCERN AND COMPASSION. It’s no wonder we find worms and acid in things we eat. It no wonder people are increasingly fickle and disloyal about brand choice. We won’t dare change a doctor / nurse / teacher who is caring, then why would we change a cosmetic, soap, a gel, a food, a drink. We need more Gandhi’s in marketing, and we need more of them in strategy. Sometimes selfish goals can only be achieved by true selflessness. Opposites do reconcile.