Sales a dirty word for management grads

Students keep refusing job offers till the final months and when nothing exciting comes their way, they take up the sales portfolio offer

Not long ago, when the ICICI Group went to B-schools to recruit students for its sales portfolio, it saw many of them were reluctant to take up the job. And, those who did accept the offer would quit a few months later.

Perplexed, the group commissioned a study across campuses to find out what students would choose, given an option, among going out for field sales and doing office work. Most ticked the latter option.

“Most people in India don’t want to sell. Pure field sales do not attract people. This is an industry-wide challenge. Thus, while industry thinks no one can sell its products, the students feel they are not good professionals,” says T K Srirang, senior general manager, human resources management group, ICICI Bank.

So, to tide over the shortage of sales professionals, ICICI joined hands with ITM University, which would run a certificate course at its Raipur campus and provide the group with sales professionals every year.  ITM usually provides ICICI with around 6,000 professionals a year.

ICICI, however, is not alone in this experience. Sales profile, say head hunters, has become an aspirational challenge for companies across the fast-moving consumer goods, banking and telecom sectors, where finding dedicated sales professionals is a problem.  

Many companies have ditched B-schools, recruiting management graduates from Tier-III and-IV B-schools for sales jobs. Kolkata-based Emami Group, which has about 750 sales staff on its rolls at various levels, visits Tier-III and -IV management institutes for the frontline field sales staff. The company, however, maintains that it is not very particular about having a management degree at this level.

The group has two levels of sales force– one sales manager and other field sales staff.  

“Nearly 10 per cent of our sales workforce comes from Tier-I and -II colleges. We put them through management trainee programme post which they get deployed as sales managers in various locations,” says N Krishna Mohan, chief executive officer (CEO)-sales, supply chain and human capital, Emami Group.  

Supreet Singh, founder and CEO at Altor Executive Search, a banking and financial services industry search company, explains when graduates pass out, they are usually ready to take up a low-end sales job.

“Since they don’t want to be sweating it out in the sun by selling products, they aspire to have a strategic role and decide to do an MBA to scale up the ladder. But they don’t realise that post an MBA, it is only the salary that may see a jump and not the profile because the industry landscape is such that 80 per cent of the jobs will be sales jobs,” says Singh.

At campuses, students keep refusing job offers till the final months and when nothing exciting comes their way, they take up the sales offer, ultimately to quit the company, he adds. So, companies are turning to graduates.

But in doing this, companies, too, have figured their ways out-- by using employability evaluation techniques to find out if the workforce they hire are indeed sales-oriented.

“Sales professionals need to be extrovert, trustworthy and friendly. These are the traits we judge through our employability evaluation techniques,” says Himanshu Aggarwal, CEO, Aspiring Minds.

Aspiring Minds, through its computer adaptive test (Amcat) measures specific assessment for sales suitability. Aggarwal’s client list includes companies such as SBI Life, HDFC, Axis Bank, L&T Finance HCL, Deloitte, Mphasis, Microsoft, MindTree, Genpact and State Bank of India.

Amcat is administered across 2,500 campuses across the country with 250,000 engineering students, 95,000 graduates and 25,000 management students taking the test.

“Unfortunately, companies hire anywhere and everywhere. If they hire 1,000 people for sales, half of them quit in the first five months.  In fact, through our tests, we go to the level of differentiating if a person is good for B2B or B2C sales professional,” says Aggarwal.