A Day at Laxmi Road Pune

I entered the SIMS on Saturday 14th June and today was my fifth day in college and I had a great feeling to be here.Now I am writing a blog on what happened today in business exercise.

The day started somehow like this.
We gathered in classroom. Kamath sir shared his experiences with us. That gave us a lot of inspiration and motivation to achieve something in our life. Then he said ." Do whatever you do , go to some place , hunt for a job abd earn some money provided you should not disclose where you are studying and dont spend a penny from your pocket.
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I was always excited to do this kind of exercise. You have to be yourself and no college name is attached with you…It tests what skills do you possess? What are you made up of.
And where you stand?

We were in a group of three. I , anuroop and ashu left for the Laxmi Road.Dint knew where the road is. Got the lift and guess what the car in which we were was the car of one of our professor who taught us yesterday.then again We got the lift in maruti 800 and after 3-4 kms of walking

We thought lets do something different that nobody does. We thought we will go to retail stores and restaurant in the end if we cant find any job. But first lets look at something new.

We went to Chartered Accountants, Printing shops, Designers, Banks, Computer Hardware and Software, tried some thing different but failed. Still we had lot of energy and got into a floor where it was written Prabhat Publications. We got the jackpot there was a newspaper Intelligent Pune, a publication from Prabhat publication.

Ashu spoke to the editor and the editor showed interest to give us some job. Now the job was either to go door to door to convince people to convince them to have the subscription of the newspaper or we can sell the ad space in the newspaper. We chose to sell the ad space.

We had a meeting with the PI editor Ms. Vinita Deshmukh and she told us about the newspaper. I am really lucky that she showed confidence in us and told us about what we have to do and how do we have to go for it.

First we got the information for what readers the newspaper is targets so that we will proceed accordingly and then we were told about the rate list for ad space. She gave us few tips about marketing like how to talk to clients and how to convince them for giving ad in this newspaper. She came up with a brilliant idea that we will devote whole center page for ads this time for monsoon special for Laxmi Road. That tips were really useful and we got to know how everything works. What is marketing all about?

We three then took some sample newspapers, rate list and some visiting cards of Ms. Vinita and left for selling ad space. We all moved into different directions and explored various shops. I went into shoes showroom, sarees and furniture. At that time I was not a SIMS student. I was just a marketing representative of Intelligent Pune newspaper. Many thoughts came to my mind whether I will be able to do it. Never had such kind of experience. Visited many stores and finally I was able to convince one person that your sales will shoot up if you would give ad in this newspaper as readers of this newspaper are high profile people and directors and CEOs of IT companies and this newspaper reach far places. I told them that readership of the IP is about 1 lakh and as monsoon season is there so you can mention about the monsoon sales you are offering. Finally I told him that if you would like we can also write write-up for you. Our journalist will come to you and you can give him the matter. Now he seemed to be convinced.

After that we three got back into the office and prepared a report on prospective clients and clients those might be interested later. We submitted the report to marketing manager Mr. Praveen Parkhi.

then we had to reach at parvati the hill top at 6 PM and all of us shared some wonderful experiences they got.

It was one of the day that I will remember in my life forever.
I learned lots and lots of things. It was a great and wonderful experience. This had fun, involved learning and moreover it tests you and your skills and what you are capable of as an individual.