DSR and OCA

The Daily Sales Report was a tool that was extremely inefficiently used except perhaps by certain managers in the system like K Ravishankar or G Prithviraj and there could be a few more. I remember Prithwish Bose of Guwahati and Kolkata quite good at it. The tool was more for the manager to assess his market situation but unfortunately it was used by them to control and antagonize the sales persons. It was like those traits of few managers who would shunt out the sales guys at 9.15 in the morning when the market place had not opened up. Imagine you sitting in your office having to encounter a sales guy trying to sell something you apparently do not need first thing in the morning.

So, what did the sales guys do? In Delhi they were the tea shops in and around Ashoka Estate while in Mumbai there was ample opportunity in Poonam Estate to disappear and not encounter the wrath of the Sales Manager. The Lam team in Mumbai was famous for the disappearing act. When wanted in Worli they would be found in Tulsiani Chambers and vice versa. This was even truer when a Head Office Marketing or Sales Person visited the Branch. They were like auditors trying to find flaws and make their assumptions and presumptions and report them back to HQ. No wonder the BSMs and RSMs and RMs had a love hate relationship with them.

Coming back to the topic of the DSR the first one that I encountered had a few columns wherein you had to put in the name of the person, the organization name and details, some sort of an assessment of the prospect in terms of coldness and warmness (somewhat like sex appeal) and of course the type of call. I leave it to your imagination what you would decipher when a salesperson would write something like this. A typical row that perhaps Llewellyn D’souza of Bombay office would write in his DSR was as follows: Vandana, Secy to MD, Blue Films Ltd, Grant Road, Warm, 2, FU. The FU would mean Follow Up so that you do not think otherwise. I had banned that phrase later from usage because it meant nothing except the slang. It sort of ridiculed the manager I thought!!

Head Office marketing of course had to be innovative what with a couple on new recruit SMTs inducted. So a new DSR was created. This one had 12 rows assuming that a typical day of a sales person would consist of 12 calls. There were 9-10 different types of calls and the prospect could be at a different stage in the selling life cycle. I think there were 12 stages and Collection of Money was definitely not one of them. No wonder Network had landed up with a huge outstanding where much later Navin Kumar started focusing on the same without much success and it required a Devesh Nayel and Subhas Guha to get in some sort of discipline.

So this DSR was a key document that could have been effectively used but then that was too complicated for Network managers to analyze (after all everybody is not G Prithviraj who took his job of training his people more seriously than HR!!). So there was this Hot/Warm/Cold analysis with time dimensions and what have you. So it were those private diaries of Sales people that would have the true stories of what was going on in their territories and not the bunch of lies written in DSRs that used to even go to HQ for analysis(sic!).

During our ISO days even the Customer Engineers had to fill up detailed reports where they had to write in even when they perhaps visited the facilities for natural biological reasons.

The OCA was another document that was a dream of the Sales person to be able to fill up on a daily basis. In the days of the 300 series that was not possible but later in the Canon days especially at Mumbai the sales guys were filling them by the dozens on a daily basis. Order Confirmation Advice was the full form and later when we had computers and systems to record these forms underwent an overhaul.

Debashis Bannerjee at Head office was responsible those days in terms of collating executing these OCAs and later in the years to come it was S. Mohan and Krishan Kapoor. The latter is of course now managing Ultra Sound Scanners at Medison. So this OCA was the single most important document as far as the salespersons existence was concerned. The number of them defined his life in terms of incentives or promotions. In later years we had even developed a system of paying incentives automatically with his salary. I also remember that one of the top sales guys (P Bansil) even received a negative salary in a particular month due to collection clauses.

A few members have talked about empty boxes being produced and supplied. So during year ends there were people in Head Office filling up false OCAs with details from Sales Person’s Hot prospect lists!! I salute the finance and accounts guys in Head Office who had to finally manage all these out of order proceedings.