The Dow went down by 777 yesterday. The last 6 months have seen terrible ups and downs in the world markets. This makes me wonder, are there lessons for me to learn as a sales person? Let me thinkUnrestrained growth meant that we all forgot fundamentals. The discipline in investment went away, and many untrained small investors started fancying themselves as "Traders". In a growing market, everyone makes money. In the process, people stopped analysing their investments and went after hot leads.
For a Sales professional in India too, last 5 years have been full of heady growth. Any ordinary salesman was meeting and beating quota targets. Instead of spending time in analysing customer needs, sales people were busy "closing" one deal after another, paying scant respect to the quality of the prospect, the risk involved and not worrying about building strong pipelines. Everyone was living in the here and now.
During the bull run, many investors went from one script to another, making quick capital gains based on hot market tips and moving money rapidly. In the process, they learnt NOTHING about investing. When the market dropped, they are clueless. They are loosing money fast, and have nowhere to invest. Everyone is living on the hope that the market will recover. Many others will never invest in equities again for a long long time.
Salesmen were in demand from varying sectors like insurance, telecom, banking, services, IT, manufacturing etc. Salespeople rapidly hopped jobs, earning ever fattening paychecks but learning prescious LITTLE. In the face of a slowdown, these salespeople face the problem of not knowing how and where to sell. We hope the recession will soon pass us by. We hope what's happening in US has nothing to do with us. But we now fear for we have learnt little.
I wish to draw the reader's attention to earlier posts on learning. Let us ask this question of ourselves - how much have we learnt?
Lastly, everyone was betting on the the euiqty and Real estate markets. High Risk - High Rewards as someone told me. Very few investors thought about spreading the risk across a wide array of assets. They hadthe proverbial "all eggs in one basket".
As salesmen preferred to hunt the big deals, companies showered praise on the "Stars" getting in the multi-million deals. The Star salemen were not interested in having a "spread". Business tomorrow will happen in the spread.
I am sure we can draw many more analogies. Would welcome comments, analogies and examples from readers.
Well, we now have some time to Pause, Think and Re-start, Let us learn from the past 5 months. Let us work on our fundamentals of Self Esteem, Discipline, Ethics, Knowledge and Respect.
Let us invest in our customers again. Happy Investing !!
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