strategy
“If I am in office for an entire week, it makes me feel unproductive.” am travelling. When I’m travelling, I never get enough sleep as I take early morning flights so I can save up on travel time. Since I look after the company’s marketing across 26 states, I try to visit each state every two months. In each location, I usually have a review with the sales team of that state after which I’ll have meetings with customers and dealers. I thoroughly enjoy that I am connected to the farmers. They have taught me all I know about agriculture as I was not trained in agriculture. I’ve done my MBA from University of Canberra, Australia and am also a chartered financial analyst. Meeting them helps us understand their habits which enables us to design products relevant for them. Being in the field keeps us in touch with the ground reality and helps to pick up the pulse of the market. It gives us a lot of product ideas and scope for innovation of our existing products. It allows me to keep a tab on outliers as well. Once, during a visit, I heard that the yield in a particular village had tripled. We later found out that it was due to a glitch by the production team which had led to the increase in the concentration of a nutrient in the fertiliser by manifolds. This unintended consequence helped us realise the increased deficiency in soil and helped to create our flagship brand. Field visits are a very important exercise as all our 85 brands of speciality fertilisers are conceptual products for agriculture. We have to educate the farmers on the importance of these micro-nutrients like zinc, iron and boron and creating their demand. We do this through systematic demonstrations and extension activities. The demand creation exercise in a village takes upto three to four crop cycles which is usually a year and a half long. It starts with recognising the highly respected farmer in the village and taking a small plot of his land where we use our products. At the end of the season, we compare the produce from the two fields so the farmer can judge for
himself. On an average, we have seen a benefit of `6 for every rupee invested. Not only is there an increase in the quantity of output but it is of better quality too. We then organise farmer meetings so that the selected farmer can talk to fellow villagers about his experience with our product. I am a part of this process often. In spite of this, some farmers still aren’t convinced. So we talk to them individually or do a trial on their land. It is usually by the third season that we get maximum demand from a village. Uptil now, we have managed to cover 1,20,000 villages but it is only one-sixth of the total villages in India. We do this with the help of our marketing team of 600 people. 150 of these only do such extension activities. We hire a lot of temps too. They can go up to 1,000 during season time. Mass media advertising does not help as farmers are not able to figure it out. In the last 42 years, we have not spend even a single rupee on it.
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4 6 | INC. | may 2013
fter my visits, when I go back to the office, the first thing I do is to look at the dispatches made and the sales report from previous days. This is the most critical part of my work. Being the marketing head of our company, I also look at product cost sheets, product profitability and branding decisions. I have realised that I have to learn to trust the management information system (MIS). Even now, I want to be present everywhere and see things for myself. If I am in office for an entire week, it makes me feel unproductive. I like going out to meet customers and solve their problems. But as our business grows more, it will be difficult to be outside this often and I will have to trust the reports and reviews given to me. Currently, I am in the office for not more than three days a week. Since I am away most of the time, it is important for me to let my team work independently so that they can get work done during my absence. Initially, I used to dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s. But, I learnt that I need to free up my time to do more important things. Giving them the authority to