Edgar Otieno always
wanted to have money.
Lots of money. Despite
having been born to a
rural family of modest
means, he knew it was a
long shot.
But it was not until he landed in Nairobi in the
mid 1990s from his village in Siaya County that
he realised just how steep the slope of life is
and the effort it would require to scale it.
It took the young Otieno nearly five years
knocking on the doors of employers before he
found a footing in what he describes as the most
unlikely place – the insurance industry.
Armed with strong belief in his ability to apply
the skills and energy he had acquired from his
parents and school, Mr Otieno has in less than
five years scaled the career ladder to stand
above Kenya’s most celebrated salesmen.
Earning an average monthly salary of Sh2.6
million, Mr Otieno is today arguably among the
best paid workers in Kenya yet he is nowhere
near what many would regard as the peak of a
career in the corporate world.
Having begun his sales career in 2006, Mr Otieno
ranks among Kenya’s truly self-made millionaires
who are out to re-engineer the stubborn belief
that working in public service is a way to riches.
Mr Otieno, who works as an independent
insurance agent, has become the industry’s
poster child.
Insurance industry insiders describe Mr Otieno’s
as an extraordinary performance that has
surprised his peers and seniors in equal
measure.
Last year, barely four years into the job, Mr
Otieno walked away with the runners-up trophy
for the Salesperson of the Year Award at the
annual Association of Kenya Insurers’ (AKI)
having clocked Sh25 million in annual premium
sales, just Sh2 million behind the winner’s Sh27
million.
Mr Otieno says his intention is to top the league
this year with a record-breaking performance.
While industry records show that at no time has
a single salesman generated Sh40 million in
Annual Premium Income (API) – the insurance
industry sales benchmark, Mr Otieno calmly
reveals that he touched the Sh41 million mark
by the end of July and is aiming to close the
year at between Sh60 and 70 million.
“He is peerless as far as salesmanship is
concerned,” says his manager, Mr Peter Muchiri.
When the Business Daily visited Mr Otieno at
his Hurlingham office for an interview, he was in
the middle of a presentation. It costs Sh2,500 to
sit in a session.
Mr Otieno eats life with a big spoon. His
business is housed in an imposing stand-alone
office block with an equally arresting interior
design and befitting furniture.
The salesman carries an intimidating aura with a
look so intense, but all that disappears once he
begins to speak.
Mr Otieno is a master orator who gives the mind
little space to wander. It takes only a few
minutes to realise that the power of the spoken
word is what makes him tick for potential
clients.
Mr Otieno’s sales career started in the
agriculture sector in 1997. Having hunted for a
job for nearly four years without success, he
invested the little money he had in buying farm
inputs from factories in Nairobi’s Industrial Area
and vending door to door in Central province.
“It was such a successful venture that within a
short time I was moving larger volumes than
established resellers,” he says.
Mr Otieno confesses that this instant success
later turned out to be his main undoing. “I had
no systems, no control and my staff – I had built
quite a large sales team by then - were selling
and not remitting the money.”
Within a short time, Mr Otieno found himself in
the radar screen of more than a dozen lawyers
who were chasing him over a Sh6.5 million debt
he owed his suppliers – a sizeable amount at
the time. He had to find money fast.
Pressure from suppliers is what pushed Mr
Otieno into looking for a job that could earn him
enough income to clear his debts.
“My wife came home one evening in 2006 and
told me of a product an insurance agent had
proposed to her,” he says. “I liked the product
and went to Pan Africa Insurance offices the next
day to learn more about it – then I offered to
sell it.”
Pius Kitela, who headed the Pan Africa Thika
agency, saw talent in the man and recruited him
on the spot. The rest, as they say, is history.
In the past three years, Mr Otieno has been
among Kenya’s top three insurance sales agents;
winning all-expenses paid for trips to Australia,
USA and Dubai.
Mr Otieno insists the surest formula to success
in sales is going beyond the call of duty to
listen, understand and help clients find
solutions to their problems.
Counting discipline, love for what you do and
competing within your strengths as the pillars of
success in life, Mr Otieno says that one only
succeeds with a well-prepared, documented and
executed roadmap. “Without one, you are lost,”
he says.
source: business daily
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