The hunt for India’s Jordan Belfort

By IndianCEO Team

Posted on January 11, 2017

“Brad, show them how it’s done. Sell me that pen!”, Jordan Belfort says to one of his associates in the movie Wolf of Wallstreet. Jordan, the suave and aggressive protagonist of the movie, founds a startup in the toughest of times and makes a fortune just through his sheer sales prowess. He also coaches his entire team on sales techniques that helps them sell anything – from pens to penny stocks. The movie character itself was based on the real-life Jordan Belfort, a stockbroker who made a fortune through similar means and after some infamy, now teaches sales techniques at seminars around the world.

Startups everywhere seem to need a Jordan Belfort (minus the notoriety ofc). In my experience of scouting for sales talent for ChalkStreet, FACE and Learnbee, even someone with half his energy and ambition would do. I often look for someone who can single-handedly change the narrative of sales & marketing for my company or product.

But finding a good salesperson is often very difficult, let alone a Jordan Belfort. So through ChalkStreet.com we have launched this contest “The Wolf of ChalkStreet” to make the search a little bit easier. Kick-starting its second edition this year, I am hopeful of finding the best sales and marketing talent for my own company and as well as for about dozen keen sponsors and partner companies.

Irrespective of background or degree or year of study, all currently enrolled UG/PG students from any of India’s educational institutions can stake their claim to be India’s Jordan Belfort.

In its first edition, The Wolf of ChalkStreet saw 20 recruiting partners and 3,000+ teams (including from IITs). This time we are targeting over 10,000 teams and an outreach to over 3 million people for the contest.

The participants can register in teams of minimum 2 and maximum 3 each to tackle a series of Sales and Marketing challenges, each contributing a certain number of points. The teams with the highest number of points qualify for a pitching round in front of C-level execs from top emerging startups. The winning team and the runner-up will walk away with Rs.1 lakh and Rs.50,000 respectively. As the title sponsor for this talent hunt, Chillr is excited about the idea of being able to put students to task on real-world marketing challenges and gain new perspectives on their product from a generation of post-millennials.

The students could also bag full-time employment offers (final year students), pre-placement offers (pre-final years) and internship offers from the recruitment partners for the event. Top emerging startups such as Swiggy, HomeLane, ChaiPoint, Chillr, GrabOn, FitCircle, Ninjacart, Furlenco, Darwinbox, Vaahika, Zolo, Credr, Xobin, LetsMath, Zopper, Turaco Mobile and Zivame have so far signed up to be recruitment partners for the contest.

Ashwin Venkatraman, COO of Furlenco is one among the recruitment partners who have returned for the second time. He says, “The contest is a unique way of attracting top marketing talent. We interviewed a handful of interesting candidates through Wolf and were quite happy with the outcome and are happy to be back.”

There is an additional level to this year’s contest. Apart from Recruitment Partners, we have a few sponsors on board too who will conduct sub-contests centred around their own brands and products. This almost creates a whole new contest eco-system. The sub-contests have their own prizes and then there are weekly, daily prizes through the duration of the contest which is 4 weeks.

Participants are expected to be savvy or be prepared to delve into the world of Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing and case study analysis of real world problems. Since registrations opened on 26 Dec 2016, more than 3000 teams have already signed up for the contest. Read Indian Startup News.

Student Teams can sign up here: www.chalkstreet.com/wolf

Note – Article is written by Srikanth Padmasola from ChalkStreet.

The hunt for India’s Jordan Belfort