An entrepreneur’s skirmishes on the marketing turf!!

“Dear Sir/Madam Greetings of the Day!! Trust you are doing well.

Recruiting the right finance professionals can be one of the most challenging, yet equally rewarding aspects of the company's human capital leaders. This realization was the precursor to the launch of cajobportal.com. Yet, you will appreciate that the entrepreneurial journey is beset with suo-moto approaching people in the remote hope that 5% of them might have an unfulfilled need which your product can offer. Hence please pardon me for my unsolicited mails

I am a student @ IIMA and have a startup – cajobportal.com – India‟s first recruitment website exclusively for Chartered Accountants “

This is how dozen of clichéd emails originate in my mailbox and are whipped off the back of gmail.com horses to the stables of those awe inspiring CFOs and HR Heads.

Hardly 1% of these emails see the light at the end of the tunnel; the rest die a premature death in the spam folders! And yet, we commit the heinous crimes of sending them!

 Similar is the fate of those calls to the Board lines

 “Hi, I am Anurag from cajobportal.com. Can you please connect me to Ms.  Pallavi Amin in HR?” “Purpose?” comes the terse reply from the receptionist. After you explain, either she hangs up or transfers the line to some perpetually ringing number or the HR picks it, listens to you for 2 minutes and then says “Sorry, I am heading into a meeting. Can we talk later? Or “Sorry, we currently are not looking for another finance hiring partner”

The question is WHY? Why this relentless pursuit of chasing people when they are simply NOT interested?

 If you are good, won’ they come automatically?

 Isnt it hara kiri‟? Each denial is literally a slap on the face, an assault on the ego and downgrading of your esteem!! As an IIMA grad, is that why we came here for?

 Jon Buscal‟s quote “Marketing is a commitment and not merely a campaign” fits in so aptly here. 

You remind yourself that the world existed without you and will continue to exist even without you.

 Life existed even without an I-Phone or a bottle of Coke or a naukri.com or a zomato.com! And so would it even without cajobportal.com!

Bitter truth but a realization that gets you going! So it is up to you and ONLY you to convince the world that it would be a better place if its citizens adopted what you had on offer.

You pull up your socks and are now willing to face rejection!

You are ready to market yourself to the world.

Google throws up 1.85 billion results in 0.40 seconds when you search the term “Marketing”. It is the most glamorous word that can excite the human imagination.

You wonder what could be that magic marketing mantra that could make 3000 Indian company sign up for cajobportal.com.

“Non deficere”, the Latin equivalent of “Never Give Up”! This to my mind is the fundamental tenet of marketing. Once this is in place, the 4 Ps and the 5Cs simply land in place.

 Who knows, you might end up selling refrigerators to Eskimos.

As a Chartered Accountant before PGPX, for 10 years, I have spent endless hours on those dull and drab Excel sheets that refused to talk. In Marketing, the best part that I now relish is that rush of dopamine in your brain when I talk about cajobportal. com

From focusing on rejections, you now start focusing on those 1% conversions and the Lifetime Value from the relationship that could run into millions of dollars.

You realise that a marketing pitch is simply an emotionally charges stimulus, a promise to a customer’s amygdala, that the anticipated gains are far in excess of what he/she is paying. It is this perpetual drift between the affect and the cognitive that you need to conquer. 

A fulfilled demand brings smiles and a brand relationship. You might need to slog yourself to the hilt to fulfil the craziest of requisitions for a Chartered Accountant is put forth.

If you goof up, your doors to the consumer’s sub conscious are closed forever. Yet if you do succeed, henceforth you have no competition. The episodic memory will bring you an impulse purchase next time. You will become a habit. And that’s the goal

Prof Sahay taught us that marketing, eventually, is all about moving from the functional to the emotional value. The best of marketers don’t exist in the consumer’s mind but in his/her heart.

Warm Regards

Sonia Singal & Anurag Singal

www.cajobportal.com