What I thought was one minutes job is not yet done even after having spent more than one day on it !!! Yesterday I set out to track some business opportunities, one of them being for a Health Insurance company (let me call it XYZ just to conceal the identities of all concerned people)… all I needed was the sales representative who manages this account so that I could take an update from him… sounds simple? Atleast I thought it was… it was meant to be a simple treasure hunt...

So first I connected with someone in the S&D Team (pardon me for these organization specific acronyms which if put together, would form an encyclopedia by themselves… it means Sales & Distribution) who said it is a GB (another acronym… stands for General Business) account and hence got me names of three sales managers in North India…. I called all three of them one by one and posed a simple question “can you please help me know who is the client rep (representative!) for XYZ?”…
Rep 1: I am not the client rep for XYZ (banged the phone!!)
Rep 2: If you don’t find the client rep, let me know, will get it assigned to myself… (that’s an easy way of client acquisition I thought!!)
Rep 3: I ‘don’t think’ it is my account… it could be tagged to Public Sector…

Got thinking… it is a JV between a private hospital chain and an international insurance company… why would it then be Public Sector… so stayed away from connecting with the Public Sector sales guys for fear of being embarrassed… I dared connecting with Rep 3 above again as he had sounded a little more friendly than Rep 1 and Rep 2… told him that it is a GB account and if he can check with someone and let me know who the sales rep is… Came back the reply “only the group’s auto ancillary business is managed from North… rest of group business is managed from South… so connect with South GB sales guys”… thankfully he was considerate enough to leave me with two names from South GB sales team…

So here I was… mercilessly thrown out of North to find my treasure somewhere in South… so be it… next I connected with one of those names and the same question was posed with little assertiveness this time “I understand that XYZ is a GB South account. And there is an opportunity identified there. Can you please let me know who is the sales rep for this account in your team?”…. well the reply from this Rep was much more assertive than my question “This is not a GB account… this should be a Sector account..” (let me not get into the difference between GB and Sector)… So after being thrown out of North, I was thrown out of GB completely (north, south, west, east… no direction to go to)…

Next task was to contact the sector lead… the only question was ‘which sector?’… being a health insurance company, it belongs to Healthcare sector or Insurance Sector? Well what if it is a cluster account (being part of a large Indian corporate business house) and hence tagged to the flagship Auto Ancillary company of the group… in that case Automotive Sector or Industrial Sector?... or Public Sector as some Rep had already indicated (without any reasoning ofcourse !!)…

My head started spinning thinking about these multiple options and so I took a small (and much needed!) coffee break… after having gathered some strength (and courage!) I called up one sector sales rep and he referred me to the other sector (had anticipated this… didn’t I?)… connected with the second sector sales rep who directed me back to first… the loop got closed and so did my treasure hunt… I didn’t dare to connect with the third, fourth and fifth sectors at all…