My Autobiography: Sponsorship for School Culturals

Our school used to hold an annual inter-school culturals event. Students of 11th Standard are generally in charge of this event. I think the event is supposed to nurture the organizational and leadership skills of youngsters.

As a part of this event, we were supposed to go to sponsorship request tours – at least for a day. Basically, 4-5 students team up and visit big shops or offices to ask for money from potential sponsors.

The school management knew that nothing much would come out of this activity monetarily, but that was not their aim.

So I and my best friend teamed up with three more students (I still remember who they were) and went to Mount Road. Why? Because someone told us that the big offices were there.

Each of us planned to take turns. First, it was my turn.

I saw a large shoe company showroom and decided to go in. One of their main business is selling school shoes, right? We went in and asked the attendant. He pointed us to the store manager. I went in and told him that we had come to ask for sponsorships.

This guy, in spite of knowing that we were little schoolboys (we were in our school uniforms), put his arms over my shoulder, guided me outside the shop (my friends followed), and went back.

I guess that was his style of saying Get Out!

Needless to say, we were a bit perturbed. But we decided that all of us should ask at least at one place before going back home.

In one office our student cultural secretary (who came with us) approached with confidence and we were able to meet the manager. He asked us to sit down and told us that he had a couple of hundred notebooks to distribute, so why don’t we take them back with us and distribute them to our friends?

We didn’t get money for advertisements but we got something at least. We were glad 😉

Little did I know that ‘Cold Calling’ (as this is called in the industry) would become a daily job for me in just six years. Yeah, we had to do this during the initial training period for our upcoming sales careers. But more on that later.

The experience that I had during this activity, although it disturbed me initially, gradually resulted in reducing the fear I had about approaching people. Even today I have no qualms about approaching strangers in an event and starting a conversation – in spite of my basic introvert nature.

That’s what the school management wanted – the experience that would enable us to get over our fear, eventually.

Destination Infinity