Admission Process of PGP in Sales & Business Leadership by Kraftshala

How do we select our cohort?

We call our admission process “Bar Raisers”. The term is borrowed from Amazon’s hiring philosophy and you can read more about this in a blog on Amazon Leadership Principles that we’d published earlier.

The below article explains how the Admission process for the PGP in Sales and Business Leadership works. We’ve also mentioned every parameter we consider during our admission process along with reasons for each. We are sharing details to give our applicants the best chance of success as this also feeds as a data point in your candidature. Because if you can prepare given the information that has been made available and ace your admission process, you have quite literally demonstrated skills we are looking for – more on this below.

But first, to understand our ethos and how we look at assessments, you will need to understand Kraftshala and the students and recruiters that are a part of it.

What is Kraftshala’s PGP in Sales and Business Leadership?

Kraftshala is a launchpad for an accelerated career path.

PGP in Sales and Business Leadership helps you land top tier roles in FMCG and SaaS companies through an intense, fun, practical and effective learning experience.

Our programs are focused on driving –

• Skills – We start from the roles which we want to open up and work backwards. We carefully pick what you need to learn, make sure you learn it by doing real work under the guidance of top practitioners, and build a strong problem solving mindset which acts as a foundation for all your future roles
• Motivation – Everyone at Kraftshala comes with a singular goal of getting on an accelerated career path and thus motivation is very clear. But more often than not, the goal is not enough – you need someone to hold you accountable. Accountability becomes easier if you are having fun in the process. We solve for these by assembling a very high potential cohort and having a dedicated team working with you and checking in to make sure you are not getting off-road.
• Outcomes – All Kraftshala programs are job linked. We may not be the largest in terms of enrolments, but are much larger in terms of verifiable placements and by placement rate, the number which matters most to our students, we are by far the largest. All education at graduate and post graduate level should lead to a tangible career outcome and this is our long game, to scale with soul.

Who is an ideal candidate for this program? What kind of student draws maximum value from Kraftshala?

Kraftshala programs are designed to get you hired.

So before we launch a program, we know exactly what roles this program will target. And the learning then is designed to meet that very specific goal.

e.g. In the PGP in Sales and Business Leadership, we focus on FMCG and B2B SaaS Sales roles and while we cover a lot of generic sales and business principles, the program is geared to land you a great role in these high paying and high growth sectors. (on a side note, if you want to know more about the FMCG Sales role, watch this explainer)

And then to train you for these roles, the programs focus on what we call – Real Play.

This is where we make you learn, work on and get challenged on exactly the same situations that you will face in your workplaces. So while there is no substitute for real work experience, this is as close as it gets.

Real play in this program happens by going into the trenches – by actually facing the customer, building conviction and knowledge of the product you are selling, knowing category and competition really well, by getting rejected, by solving conflicts, and figuring out how to constantly get better.

In FMCG sales and B2B SaaS sales projects, we get you to do a 100 hour project each with an actual Sales Manager from Nestle or Turbohire or Tranzact and solve the business problem they are facing.

So to do well, students need to have the following skills.

• Learning agility – Simply put, they should be curious to seek more information, should be confident to not get disheartened by feedback and should have the humility to be able to reflect on what their shortcomings are and absorb good ideas no matter who they come from.
• Ownership / Proactiveness – While all roles require ownership, but in sales since you are directly responsible for closing revenue, you have to get great at this. Some examples of “ownership” in workplace:
  • Do you deliver results by focusing on what’s in your control instead of focusing only on external reasons?
  • Do you call a distributor / client when promised?
  • Do you show up on time?
  • Do you raise and solve for things even if they are not listed as your direct KPI – e.g. motivation of your team, a gap in your product which can potentially impact your future deals, information about a competitor who started giving massive discounts in a neighboring region
• Problem Solving – We can rename all kraftshala programs to Problem Solving programs and we may be more accurate. It’s that important! Which is why a huge part of the program is dedicated to building first principle thinking. It involves various things – how do you go about solving problems, how do you gather data, how do you hypothesize, how do you make assumptions, how do you narrow down on what to solve for, and so on.
• Impactful communication – Communication is important. But by communication, we dont mean your English, but being able to sound natural, confident and energetic and having good listening skills. While brevity and structure are also important parts, but these are coachable aspects which we also pick in the program.

Please do note – Each of the above skills gets built in the program as well, but given the importance of these skills, they form the foundation of our assessment process.

How do we assess your candidature?

So now that you know what we are looking for, let’s get to the how:

We have a simple application form + first call that allows us to measure the relevancy of the outcomes our applicants want to achieve and the impact Kraftshala can have on them. This means we do not accept applicants who we can’t give an extremely high ROI, period.

Next, we invite applicants to a 1-1 session. This slightly higher commitment action helps us move forward with only the highest intent applicants. We have 1-2 such discussions depending on the performance and our conviction in each applicant’s candidature.

The 1-1 session is divided into 3 parts:

If you don’t remember any of the above, only remember this:

At all points we will go deeper, to know your WHY. So focus on show and tell instead of just tell. Eg. If you say you love learning, demonstrate. So our further probe would be – What makes you think you love learning? Tell me about your transition from engineering to sales. How did you manage to pick up the new things?

Here’s what the Kraftshala rubric table looks like

A rubric is a scoring guide that articulates the expectations for an assignment/ assessment by listing criteria & defining levels for each criteria. If the above definition sounds too technical, don’t bother reading it again, just start again from what follows below:

Here is the rubric (scoring method) which our panelists use –

Max score is 5 on each parameter. Once the conversation session is done, the Academic team spends 1-2 hours discussing each applicant. Scoring works as follows:

One final word – enjoy the process.

Even if you realize mid-process that the program is not a right fit, or if you don’t make it, what will be truly worth your and our time would be if you can have fun in the hours that you spend with us and if we can mutually learn from each other.