My journey

I finished my engineering back in May of 2004 and college life ended very fast for us there were additional sessions from the placement cells due to a slowdown in the market. I really had no means of earning and joining a call Center was never really on my agenda list though it was a very good option to make 15 to 20k in a month. I had to sit back at home and try continuously at the walk-ins but most of the recruiters rejected me due to two factors

1. A very good academic record (that feared them that I might leave after getting some experience)

2. I may be underpaid during that period of slow down and I may leave eventually

I kept on knocking the doors, but nothing happened until one day when a friend of mine told me that Wipro is hiring network engineers, and I attended the interview and after 3 very tough rounds I was able to get a job via a partner franchise of Wipro. The first day was hectic as I was deployed at a technical helpdesk that was catering to a large call Center of around 5000 associates, I was determined to make a mark and so I ensured that I am putting in my 100% to learn all that was available to me. After 6 months into this job and putting in my best I was able to see the success I wanted to see in the form of people calling the help desk and asking for me to assist them with their issues (you can read about my first job here https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/my-first-job-abulhasan-jafery/?trackingId=bYyZGZ%2FZS2uVQwSFD1GfMA%3D%3D).

I grew gradually and slowly but steadily transitioned to sales and after spending 9 long years I left Wipro and joined IBM as sales account manager but somewhere I knew that I have to get into an OEM led business to see the real challenge and make a name for myself and thus this search lead me to Juniper Networks where I started handling the BFSI business and after a short stint of 4 years I turned the region around and grew the business from $280k per year to $4mn per year but I was still not satisfied and wanted more adventure so I joined BMC software in 2022.

The job at BMC software happened to be a different game all together and all my expertise from the previous organizations appeared to be useless as it was a value selling engagement rather than just a solution sales engagement. The hero from IBM and Juniper slowly and steadily started turning into zero and in came my first anniversary of the job without even closing a significant deal.

I was traumatized and running low on confidence as there was nothing to show as an achievement and half of my salary (the commission) was not paid due to no new business signing. This was a very critical time and in came the support of my bosses who started doing small talk sessions with me to understand where exactly I was having problems and tried addressing what was not working for me. After a brief while and a bit of hand holding came in my first deal which really turned things around for me and not only did this help me open my account but also helped us get into a big conglomerate. Looking back and repeating the exact steps of value selling I was able to repeat my wins 5 times in next 4 months and thus closing business very high and becoming the highest achiever in the whole Asia pacific region.

The last 2 years were hectic and drained me mentally, but it really made me think and conclude following

1. Even the poorest of the performers can be trained and made to deliver the best results

2. Everyone needs hand holding through good as well as bad, in my case my leaders and my peers did this for me

3. No matter how trained you are there is always scope for learning new stuff and improving

The best part of this whole journey was that everyone cheered wholeheartedly at the end when I delivered the results :)