Paul Writer launches SAP Think Tank , 
Video interview series with Head of Sales highlighting best practices
Devendra Chawla
President – Food Bazaar
Future Group
Your advice to young professionals looking at sales as a career…
This is very close to my heart, because I believe that whether you are a chairman of a company, of a hundred billion dollar company or you’re a salesman, we all are salesman, I think everybody is a salesman in life. Even if you sell an idea to somebody, even if somebody says “vote for me” what you’re trying to say is that I’m giving you an idea and if you subscribe to my idea, you’ve bought into my idea so you vote for me. I think that is indirectly selling. Don’t get me wrong, what I meant selling is not literally selling a product in exchange for money. Selling means -do you listen to me, can I influence you, do I make sense to you? So I think first of all whoever you are you have to know sales. Anything you do in life, you have to reach out to people and convince them, genuinely and honestly so you have to know sales. Over my 20 years, I’ve seen sales for asian paints and I used to work for coca cola and I’ve done sales at every single level from CEO to a salesman also when I started. I think my only advice is that actually sales is working backwards you have to see where the consumer is because is you keep the consumer at the center of every conversation or decision making then every answer will come but if you start from saying I will tackle that consumer or sell to that consumer then it is negotiation that negotiation is a very small part, a very small subset of selling. I see a lot of people making that negotiation complete selling which I think is not utilising the full skill of sales. So lets take an example if today customers are so big on digital you have to first learn how the customers are getting educated about a product. They may learn at a store, they may learn online and how do they place the demand, where do they want to buy and then the sales person whichever level you are – typically somebody who is starting in sales should be even more quick on that one and then he should make a strategy on how to go behind the customer and in an FMCG at least the customer is a distributor or an outlet like I’m a customer for many companies they come and sell to us. So like a big shampoo company will come and say “listen I’m launching a new shampoo can you sell it in your store” so they are selling to me and then in turn we both end up selling to the consumer. But in our selling we don’t have physical conversation with the customer barring a few categories but I think the whole thing is that you have to keep the customer in the center.
“Anything you do in life, you have to reach out to people and convince them, genuinely and honestly so you have to know sales.”
