The day began with the inauguration ceremony that witnessed the charismatic Vanya Mishra and several leaders across the industry address several students from NITIE and other B-schools in Mumbai. More than 1,000 students from NMIMS, SJMSOM, IIT Bombay, KJ Somaiya, etc participated in MAHA MANDI 2014 to sell various educational toys namely ‘Tangram’, ‘Brain Tonic' ‘Geoboard’ Jodo 3D ‘Rangometry’ ‘Number Balance' and Solar tourch ".
The most significant facet of this issue was that these toys are created by an NGO, Navnirmiti and all the finances generated from this bodily function will be used by them to provide the impoverished children a safer hereafter. Maybe this was that extra driving force with which my group (Santosh Bharti , Karishma and Rahul) was working. There was a sense of doing something for a reason.
As all naïve sellers, our group was also anxious and many questions were pondering inside us like “What is Mandi all about”, “Will we be able to trade all these inventories”, “How are we getting to treat our customers” and so on and so forth. A collaboration of excitement plus nervousness was flowing between all of us. But keeping apart all our troubles, we decided that we will sell all these by the end of the day. I recollected one of the concepts taught by Prof Mandi “Impossible is nothing” and with all the inspiration inculcated by him we decided to go forward.
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We began our journey from Kanjumarg Railway station and commenced selling the products. Within no time we were starting to repel our customers and driving them away. I realized that what we are doing is no easy job. 15 minutes down the cable and not even a single product sold, and what we could see was only some irritated faces looking at us with weird reflections. Yes, it was tough and suddenly all the energy level was going down the drain. With all this not-so-successful-tenure, we boarded our train for CST.
I was possibly looking outside and trying to comprehend what went wrong and how it could be rectified but I was not getting any answers and my mind refused to answer this query. Suddenly I heard some noise and observed someone demonstrating “Rangometry”. She started by targeting a family and on the spur of the moment I could see people were more interested and curious to see what we are serving. I felt that this is the proper time to target audience . Within next 15-20 minutes, we sold inventory worth 1k and suddenly the energy level was at an all-time high and was giving us an adrenaline rush. We all looked up like a professional who meant some serious concern. By the time I got down at CST Railway Station I had already learnt several lessons.
1) Impossible is nothing.
2) Someone needs to take the role of Leadership.
3) When the odds are against you, make sure you stay calm and optimistic that things will change and swim against the tide and all odds and success will kiss your feet.
We bedded down at CST railway station taking pics with our customers and suddenly the energy level was sky rocketing and our next destination was Gateway of India. We resolved to board a Bus in order to arrive at our next new destination and meanwhile started selling in the bus itself and targeted our potential clients.
By 2pm we reached our new destination - Gate way of India. We were feeling hungry, perhaps a little tired too. All this running around had drained us. But the sense of making some serious business got our mojo back. We forgot all our miseries that only seemed minuscule in front of out task and resumed with our selling.
Matters were running smoothly and we all were happy sipping the Starbucks coffee and loving the music. That’s the time I get a call from Sucheth saying that no one is buying Jodo Block and it’s getting kind of difficult.
We took it in more of a reluctant way thinking we will be able to sell that. Yes! Overconfidence was brewing in that coffee shop, without us realising. With that we again resumed our selling and it didn’t demand more time for us to realize that Rahul was right. No one was interested in buying Number balance and that helped me learn yet another lesson that never be overconfident during the selling. Each client is different and we need to be on our toes till your last inventory gets sold.
45 minutes had passed and we were not able to sell anything and that was perhaps the time Prof Mandi’s teaching came to my mind and we had a eureka moment. To me IE changing the strategy when things are not working and this time the requirement was to find some other place. Location is a factor that we can never ignore.
We realized at that point of time that there are many others from our college and change in customer behaviour is mainly due to seeing lots of white Mandi shirts roaming around the same street and customers were probably getting frustrated seeing the White Minions everywhere. The moment we realized that, we changed our strategy and moved to Nariman Point. Thank god we had this experience, or else our learning would have been unfulfilled and suddenly the magic was back. We stepped inside Nariman and within 10 minutes all the inventory got sold and a feeling of mission accomplished poured in.
We sat there and started doing some crazy things, the details of which is at best in everyone’s interest skipped. But all I can say is, it was sure justified. Our first selling experience had been a success.
