Monday 23 June 2014

CarTrade.com: Struggle

After that long training I came out of Tata Motor Finance office & called AVP for some leads but he said that 'you have to do cold calling. Moreover you will get some help from Hiren Shroff.' Hiren Shroff - senior sales manager of Gujarat who took my interview. I called Hiren sir but he said that 'I am in a meeting & I will call you in a while.' I did cold calling earlier during my internship but at that time I had an open market & here it was limited upto car dealers only. So to find those leads I used google as it always help. I found the list of dealers on just dial.

So I started visiting the dealers as per just dial & after visiting couple of dealers I reached narayanpura, hub of used car dealers in Ahmedabad. I started making calls there & four dealers one after another said that they are registered on cartrade. I knew there is different department of sales but I didn't knew that registration of both sales & auction is different as I was given very long training of 10 minutes. So I might not have remmebered it. While doing 5th call I finally met Hiren sir at that dealer's place. Hiren sir is a sindhi so he tried to bring me in my comfort zone by using it. He talked to AVP about my calling & asked what were his plans about me. It was sweet of him that he did his best to bring me in my comfort zone from day one. So this was the first day of my cold calling.

Then next whole month went just in making the script to use while approaching the dealers. I accept that I was very slow in that case. In that month I got to know that auction's registration is done seperately & it has nothing to do with registration of sales. In between I got my first salary. First salary is special for everyone it was special for me too. I can't express in words that happiness of first salary. As they say its pretty hard to earn first penny & last penny of life & after working for two and a half months I got my first salary so the happiness was on the next level altogether. It was the best part of the company that they pay to their employees on time.

It was time to know flaws in the product. In the next month as I started approaching the dealers, I came to know that from these kind of auctions dealers doesn't get any help from the banks. Moreover dealers don't even get the complete papers of most of the vehicles they buy in the auction. Ofcourse it wasn't discussed in that long training. In short there was not much benefit for the dealer in registering for the auction. So it wasn't a cakewalk as it was described by AVP. I discussed whole thing with Hiren sir as I wasn't being able to sale even a single registration.

He then adviced me to approach kavadiwalas as they will be interested in buying salvage vehicles from our auction. So I started visiting kabadi markets of Ahmedabad but there was a big hurdle in the sale of registration & that was their backwardness in the field of technology. They believe that internet is chaos as they don't understand most of it. Finally couple of kabadi walas shown some interest in registering but they kept me running around them. They had no intent to register but they used to call me thrice a week & used to give me another date. Tareekh pe tareekh was not going to go for much time. It was a learning curve that my first two prospects did this to me. Then it was the end of second month & sales was zero in this month too. All of the sudden management started new kind of auction in the third week of october which will be discussed in the next part.

To be continued...

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