Friday, April 20, 2007

Monkey Dolls & Attitude

Whenever I see these guys standing in sweltering heat in street corners to sell you those soft toys, I am thrilled. Amazing perseverance these people should have.

I run a large sales team of some 100 odd people and my biggest challenge with them is to get their attitude right. And in summer months, to make them do even the basics like going into the market. And these guys are paid well.

I wonder what motivates the monkey doll sales guys. Maybe they don’t belong to the cream and the money that is gained out selling is of paramount importance to them. I guess it can’t be anything else. But so could the AC room sales people be. I get motivated by so many things and of which one is surely money.

But I guess it has got more to do with the attitude. I have this poster in my desk that reads as follows.

We cannot change the inevitable
The only thing we can do is play
on the one thing we have,
and that is our attitude.
I am convinced that life is
10% what happens to me and
90% is how i react to it.
And so it is with you...
We are incharge of our attitudes


I am generally a non-believer when it comes to books & motivating posters and stuff. I have always thought that it is within oneself and you don’t really gain by reading about positive thinking. Particularly after learning that one of these guys who made millions by writing about ‘positive thinking’ committed suicide. Despite that I keep this poster. Because I almost felt that it captures what I have in my mind more than anything else.

I think it is all about attitude and then you never realize the pain. The motivator could be anything. Could be money, love, growth, proving a point, anything. But it is attitude that counts the most. I can see that in some of these sales guys’ eyes. Unrelenting in their follow-up, they make me buy almost any damn thing they sell, which I completely have no use for. Just as a toast to their attitude.

Maybe I should send a few guys in my team to sell monkeys in street corners and see how they fare. If they fail, I could make them one myself as a strange case of reverse evolution.

3 comments:

sidwho? said...

My instinct tells me -- " be afraid, be very very afraid":-)

Once I had this guy in a DSA team who spent saturdays and sundays entirely selling soft toys on the street- apparently , a blind mother and partially crippled father made them. The guy was fired because he couldnot work on staurdays for us!!!
Its not a fair world- we lazy bums get pampered and the real sloggers get fired all the time......

sidwho? said...

There is Google Ad for something that makes you fall asleep fast on your blog site... did they read the several passages devoted to your nocturnal anxieties? Or is it they are recommending your site to accomplish their promised effect??

Shrikanth said...

Haha, yeah, I subscribed for adsense. Shows how stupid softwares are. I had related words in my blog like insomnia for this advt to appear. Or maybe what you say is also right ! :))