Learning from tough customers (A true story)

A few hundred yards from?BBD Bag & Tiretti Bazaar & facing the iconic Tea Board at Brabourne Road in Calcutta, are located the parallel lanes of Ezra & Pollock Street – the nerve center of east India’s electrical trade market. If you’ve been there, you might know that it’s cutthroat pricing & wafer-thin margins for sellers there and yet they won’t give up a tiny shop here for a swankier store in the city. Competition is a signal of collective reassurance for buyers who come here. Any buyer. It’s also a sign of mutual respect, cumulative wisdom & forward motion for the trade. Each trader, big or small, has a loyal niche. They never compete on price. The rule of the Bazaar is that you don’t grow at the cost of others, but all of you grow despite each other. And when everyone grows, the Bazaar grows.

In Feb 2001, barely 2 years into my sales career, I found myself being promoted to an Area Manager & handed the largest ASM territory in India that included the top two channel partners, both from Calcutta. Riding high on youthful aggression & unadulterated ideology, I launched myself into a mission to ‘tame’ our No. 1 dealer, someone who was a legend in the industry, and who, by virtue of being a tough nut that he was, was famous for his arm-twisting techniques & for frustrating the hell out of the entire organization. What followed over the next few years was a tug of war between two obstinate people from two generations, in a constant state of conflict & yet each of them being fiercely loyal to a brand, resulting in our individual business numbers breaking new records and our initial animosity turning into immense mutual respect & a lifetime of friendship. This post is my humble tribute to him (let me call him MG, to respect his privacy), an icon in India’s electrical market. Depending on your individual brush with him, you might like him or dislike him, but you could never ignore him.?In this post, let me try to articulate the top 7 lessons I learnt from him.

1. Reputation & Identity are non-negotiable?– No matter which organization you belonged to; it was a given that you had heard of MG. He was the stuff trade folklore is made of, with everyone having his / her own ‘MG-Story’?to share. Loved, criticized, revered, or feared, there was no one who didn’t know him. Once, when a retailer wasn’t paying even after the credit term had expired, he found a dozen policemen land up at his doorstep, who whisked him away to the nearby Lal Bazaar Police Station & that led him to soon pay up with interest. It was a small amount. But as MG explained to me over a cup of tea, he could not afford to set a precedence in the Bazaar. One bad debt meant a dent on a reputation built over decades.
2. ?Toss it up. Check once in 3 weeks?– One thing that flummoxed the brightest of MBAs from our organization & also every other dealer in the market was MG’s pricing strategy. For two years in a row, I kept him at a discount level that was either at par or even slightly lower than the next 3 dealers. And yet, he consistently kept beating them on price on all major tenders, leading my other CPs suspect that I was perhaps being secretly partial to MG. It was only years later when we had more informal conversations that I understood his complex yet brilliant strategy of tossing in all products of all organizations (his own brand included) and averaging on his selling price that he would decide for any particular month. This meant that he?separated?his cost from his price.?This also meant that probably for those two years, he didn’t make much margin on my product, but didn’t let go of his market. Add to this his superb accounting practices where he would audit his cash flow and margins every 3 weeks, and he was unbeatable!
3. Customers put money on winners?– Winning the top dealer trophy at the annual dealer meet was not some casual competition for MG. It was almost a life & death thing. No matter how tough a year might have been for him, he would make sure that it ended with his numbers on top of the heap. His showroom & office shelves were packed with awards & photographs of his organization’s winning streak. Even in those pre-social media days, MG understood the wisdom of?visibility equaling relevance. You could not go through a single day without being visually bombarded with mementos bearing logos declaring him to be the No. 1 dealer in India. He had a brand recall that was almost equal to that of organizations he represented. So, if you were a first-time customer walking into the Bazaar to buy an electrical item, it was highly likely you would be lured to visit his showroom, thanks to all the passive branding buzzing at the back of your mind.
4. When life gives you a lemon?– Way back in the early 90s, MG’s younger brother was kidnapped by a prominent rebel outfit in the Northeast. When they called MG & his father with a demand for Rs 2 crore as ransom, his father asked the rebels to ‘keep him’.?Seriously, I’m not kidding! His brother actually stayed with the rebels for a few months, by when they got really frustrated and eventually let him go in lieu of Rs. 50000 only. Narrating the story to me one day, MG chuckled and said that in the years that followed, thanks to the relationship they had developed with some members of that outfit, they gained a few hundred times of what they paid as ransom because the group would not interfere in their business after that, and they were able to go and sell in areas where other suppliers feared going.
5. Have a network that people are in awe of?– Walking out of Calcutta airport one day in early 2002, I realized it was a ‘Bandh’ called by the local government, meaning that the state would be at standstill for the day. When I could not manage to find a cab despite pleading for 2 hours, I finally called MG. Believe it or not, 30 mins later, his car (escorted by two police vehicles) showed up at the airport, picked me up and dropped me home.?MG’s network was legendary. Till date I am not sure how much of what we knew was truth & how much was folklore, but whenever I got an opportunity to witness firsthand, I was amazed & awestruck.
6. Information is everything?– From the time when people entered our office to the exact stock position at the various depots in the country; from the exact itinerary of leadership teams visiting town, to the intricate details of the latest gossip in the company grapevine , MG was on top of it all (?he actually knew in advance?before me?on both occasions when I was promoted while in the region) . Consistently, month on month, year on year. His methods of extracting information were something to learn from. From the ASMs and Sales officers, the logistics managers and the depot managers, the accountants & the VP’s personal assistant, MG would have his periodic catchups with one and all. He was a master of assimilating information, slicing it and using it to his advantage. Till date I have never seen any other business owner who is so involved in each and every micro detail of the day-to-day business. No wonder it was impossible to bluff MG.
7. Part in style?– I mentioned our initial animosity. Over time, as he understood that I won’t give in to his smooth talk & charm, he just accepted me as I was. And he stepped on the pedal to prove me wrong. Month after month, he fought to keep his numbers higher than others who I was trying to pull up to homogenize the Bazaar. But he was the biggest sport I had ever seen in my life that far. On my second last day of my last month in the role, he took me out for lunch. It was a tough year-ending month. The market was down & business was at an all-time low. After?pleasantries were over, he asked me softly how much?I was short on my annual target. I had about 2.5 crores to go. He picked up the phone and called our logistics leader in the office, asking him to fax the stock list of all depots in eastern region to his store manager who (as instructed by MG)?just signed on the stock list & faxed it back, making it an order that added to 5.2 crores! He didn’t stop there. He smiled and said, ‘?Aisa nahin honaa chahiye ki log bole ki Ayon maal thhok ke bhaag gaya aur collection nahin kiya..’(‘It shouldn’t so happen that people accuse later that Ayon dumped stocks & did not collect money’), calling his accountant from right there & instructing him to pay for the entire inventory up front with a cash discount instead of asking for a standard 45 day credit that he was entitled to, and which normally used to get extended. For years after that lunch meeting, I have often wondered what MG got by sending me off so nicely. After all, I was an eyesore for him. I really don’t have an answer. Maybe that’s what made him such an enigma. And what separated him from the rest.

In two decades of my career, I have brushed shoulders with some of the brightest colleagues, competitors, and customers. But there was something unique about MG. He was an institution in himself who taught me more than what a university education could possibly have. He was amazing.

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(This is an excerpt from my 2021 bestselling book, 'Life-ing it', available on Amazon in your country)

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