A young salesman learnt a valuable lesson on how to deal with the quirks of selling
I had joined Godrej and Boyce as a salesman less than a year back. I was assigned the job of selling steel windows manufactured by us at our Lalbaug plant. Our sales office was located at Waudby Road where today the glass and aluminum Godrej Bhawan stands opposite Bombay Gymkhana.
In those days, fresh salesmen were trained by senior salesmen who took them along when they made field calls.
One day in 1961, when it was raining heavily, my senior colleague Minoo F. Tarapore asked me to accompany him to the office of Haribhai Desai, a builder whose office was on the fourth floor in a building at Walkeshwar.
Fully drenched, we climbed up to the fourth floor, breathing heavily as we entered Desai’s cabin. After the usual pleasantries Tarapore asked me to hand over the quotation for the steel windows to Desai. The quotation was bulky. After a cursory glance at it, he turned the pages and went to the last page where the total price of the offer was mentioned. As I recall, it was around Rs 12 lakhs.
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One look at this figure and something happened to Desai. He shut the folder and flung it out of the window behind him.
Both of us were shocked. I ran towards the window just in time to catch a glimpse of my quotation flying through the rain and wind, before falling into the puddles below. Feeling deeply hurt and not sure what to say, I returned to my seat.
Tarapore looked at me, held my arm and gestured for me to keep quiet and sit down. He regained his composure and looked straight into Desai’s eyes as if nothing had happened and politely said, "Arrey Saheb you have thrown our quotation out of the window but on such a rainy day having come all this way, will you not offer us even a cup of tea?”
Desai ordered the tea and we sipped it without uttering a word. "Nice cup of tea,” Tarapore broke the ice. "Our tea is always good, with fresh tea masala which my wife makes,” replied Desai.
Once the ice was broken, Tarapore took charge of the conversation and God knows what he said. Ten minutes later Desai asked Tarapore, "Do you have another copy of the quotation?” Luckily we had an additional copy which we gave to him. He went straight to the last page, circled the price, wrote ‘Accepted’ and signed it.
We got the order.
Courtesy Change (November-December 2010), the house magazine of Godrej and Boyce Manufacturing Company Limited.