Either You Sell or you Don't !! There are no two ways about it !

Ah... Another refreshing Marketing experience! Kind of brought back memories from the World MBA tour held last december

The occasion was the Career 2007 expo held annually by the Education Devp Board, Govt of Singapore. Growing rapidly in size and strength every year, the CAREER Expo Series has become the Largest and Longest career and educational event in Singapore and the region. It has maintained an impressive track record over the years with increasing number of quality exhibitors and visitors at each year’s exhibition and as a full time student; yours truly got the opportunity to represent S P Jain at the exhibition.

This year there were 3 different pavilions in the education sector:
Renowned Local & Foreign Institutions and Universities (S P Jain, NUS, NTU, UNSW etc.)
The European Pavilion (Les Roches, IMI, Switzerland etc.) and
Special Interest Pavilion (the most popular being the Casino Training Institute!!:-)

It was a kind of a totally different experience for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, we had never met so many people (more than a thousand) belonging to different races, ethnicity, occupations, countries and backgrounds; all in a span of just 3 days

Second, the event gave us a wonderful opportunity to model and develop our own elevator pitch for S P Jain and I can safely assume that by Day 3 we were able to optimise the pitch to 100% effectiveness.

Third, it taught us how to focus and market to the target audience.

Forth, it taught us much needed endurance in a typical sales role. It was very tiring to stand and interact with the seemingly never ending queue of visitors... (I almost crashed out after Day 3!! :) )

Some funny incidents...

It happened a couple of times that when we tried pitching the S P Jain, 1-year Dual City MBA model to a parent, he heard me out patiently and then said... "Dude, you know what? You have just sold my own MBA degree back to me!" I was flabbergasted! "How on earth can that be!!" I wondered...
“Yeah! I am an MBA from SP Jain, Mumbai - Batch 4, 1985, now working as a MD with a leading financial institution!", came the quick, assertive reply followed by a appreciative grin. :-)

And then there was this cute Chinese girl on day 1 who came to our stall and uttered "Easpee P ee Jaineee?" I took off with my elevator pitch for the next one minute or so, she listened intently and then after I had finished my pitch, she innocently said "no Englisaa... only Chineseee.... la"
"Uh Oh!!" How I wished I vanished somewhere that very moment! "Puff...!!"

And then there were many interesting people I got a chance to work with... Nirmala Ma'm, who has got a helluva lots of enthusiasm that is utterly contagious (wow! she sold helicopters at one point in her career! How cool!!), Neethu, with whom I worked with for the World MBA tour as well, and many other including a 20-strong team of budding MBAs who just joined the S P Jain GMBA program.

I met some very famous people too... the Education Minister of Singapore, head of the EDB, an industrialist from Pune (India), a journalist from India and representatives and academics from leading universities.

We had a really good time I must say! And although our batch of 2007 is at the fag end of our mba life, I'd like to have the opportunity of an encore.