Vineet Agrawal, and a Billion-Dollar Soap Opera

Inside story of the slow, stubborn ascent of Wipro's consumer business

- Pankaj Mishra

Late in the 1980s, in a cramped shop in Rajpura, Punjab, three generations of a family business stood behind the counter. The matriarch, at its center, listened without much expression as a young Wipro salesman named Sunil Batra tried to persuade her to take his soap. She finally said, "You'll get promoted and leave. We'll remain stuck with your soap."

Batra didn't defend the product. He leaned, slightly. "Maaji, you call me your son. Yet wouldn't a mother want her son to get promoted?"

She hesitated, then told the younger man beside her to pull several cartons from the stack.

Standing a step behind, Vineet Agrawal—only months into his first sales job—watched the exchange. Nothing about it felt like a 'pitch'. Batra wasn't selling soap so much as selling trust, and he had turned the conversation with one line.

Later, in Punjab's turbulent years, when markets were broken by curfews and armed checkpoints, Batra was once on a bus that was hijacked. What saved him was not luck but a connection: an older woman he had befriended on an earlier trip recognized him, spoke to the hijackers, and convinced them to let him go. He was back at work the next day.

For Agrawal, it was a lesson he never forgot: in sales, relationships could mean the difference between walking away with an order or walking away from it all.

A few weeks later, in another small Mumbai town, Agrawal was with Ayaz Hussain, a senior whose name carried weight in Wipro's sales team. Ayaz was carrying one of the toughest products in the portfolio—787 laundry soap, a byproduct of vanaspati or hydrogenated vegetable fat. Detergent bars had already entered the market, with far superior cleaning quality. The 787 bar was cheap, low-grade, and if unsold, dried up to become rocky within a month or two. Retailers despised it.