Overhearing a marketing guy

If you remember the newspapers few months back regularly told us that the India has been affected by recession and jobs have become scarce. This provided a genuine excuse to every Indian company to deny increments to its employees and ask them to cheer up because they were not being laid off. Since I also work for an Indian company the same happened to me with one exception. My company picked some employees from production and shifted them to marketing.

The management told us that the employees shifted from production to marketing were due to their performance. According to me it meant management thought those who were no good in production were been shifted to marketing. I tried to explain this to a colleague and she stopped talking with me. Well actually we didn’t have to much talk anymore. She was happy taking up the new responsibilities that will make her prospective employers’ think that she was a jack of all trades and I was stuck in Production.

What surprised me the most was the fear in people. Not a single person told that he is not going to shift to marketing because he was not an MBA (Marketing). It is so sad that we don’t have any Conan O Brien in India. No one in India dares to say to management that I am not your bitch.

The management after shifting few people to marketing realized that there was not enough space in the marketing department’s room for placing so many computers. So it decided to not to shift the sitting place of new people joining marketing. This meant I can now hear people calling customers and know that the customers think the only thing that is worst than our products is our after sales service.

There is a guy who has been shifted from production to marketing. He is very nice guy, very hard working with only one problem. He carries a slow clock. Due to his the work that others can do in eight hours, he takes twelve hours. Except being a bit inefficient I think he is a great resource. 

I told you before that there is limited sitting space in the marketing department. Hence, this guy sits on the same floor as I do. Today I got a chance of overhearing him having a telephonic conversation with a customer. The guy told the customer his name and the customer I think said he doesn’t know anyone with such a name. My inefficient workaholic colleague then told the customer that we had talked before about the product. I think the customer said yes because Mr Workaholic didn’t launch into an explanation on what our company does and why is he calling the customer during business hours.

I listened to the conversation and decided to concentrate on my work. The marketing guy was talking with the customer in the most co-ordinal manner as possible and I felt the customer was wishing the era where mobile companies charged for incoming calls would have been back so that he could lambast the marketing guy of my company.

To sum up

The marketing guys in my company are awesome. They talk with customers as if they are talking with an old friend and the customer treats them as if the person calling them is their ex-BF/GF.