By a former associate of Kunwer Sachdev
Most companies, when they need salespeople, do the same thing. They post a vacancy, they ask for a degree, preferably an MBA, and they interview the people the degree sends them. Kunwer Sachdev looked at that entire pipeline and decided it was solving the wrong problem. So instead of placing a job advertisement, he produced a television show.
The chronicler has always regarded Sales Ka Bazigar as one of the purest expressions of how the founder’s mind actually worked — because it was three completely different things at once, and he appears to have known it. The same instinct that put brand before budget on every dealer board also put Su-Kam on primetime.
What it was
Sales Ka Bazigar was a talent show, conceived and produced by Sachdev himself, aired on ETV. Its premise was a quiet provocation aimed at the whole of corporate India: a hunt for the best salespeople who did not have an MBA degree. No business-school pedigree required. No résumé of brand names. Just the raw, unteachable instinct for selling — and a national stage on which to prove you had it. The Times of India later called it a first time in India — a reality show to find the best salesperson.
He did not outsource the casting. In his own account, he personally scouted contestants at exhibitions and events across the country, assembling a deliberately diverse pool of people the conventional system would never have shortlisted. The show found an audience, and that audience did something useful for a power-backup company: it made Su-Kam a household name across the North Indian states, in homes that had never read a single line of the trade press. The popularity, in turn, drew sponsorship from major brands — so the thing that was building Su-Kam’s reputation was, characteristically, paying for itself.
Why he really did it
It is tempting to file Sales Ka Bazigar under marketing and move on. The chronicler will resist that, because the show was an argument, and the argument was personal.
Sachdev did not believe selling was a credential. He believed it was a native talent — and he had earned the right to that belief the hard way. This, after all, is the man whose own origin story runs through selling pens on the buses of Delhi long before he sold a single inverter. He had been, himself, exactly the kind of person an MBA filter would have screened out. A talent show that went looking for ungraded, undegreed selling ability was, in a real sense, a man building the ladder he had once needed and never been handed.
It is the same instinct, the chronicler notes, that ran the chess-match-as-recruitment-interview at Su-Kam’s Sports Day — the founder standing at the edge of the room, watching not the score but the people, marking the strategists and the closers nobody else had noticed. Sales Ka Bazigar was that same exercise, scaled up to a television studio and broadcast to several states at once. The Sports Day found talent inside the building. The show went looking for it in the entire country.
The genius of doing three things with one move
What makes the show such a clean window into the founder is its sheer efficiency of intent. In one production, Sachdev was:
Recruiting. He was building a pipeline of genuine sales talent, identified under pressure, on camera, in front of a live audience — a far more revealing test than any interview room.
Branding. He was putting Su-Kam in front of millions of ordinary North Indian viewers, in their living rooms, in their language, attached to something they actually enjoyed watching. No billboard buys that kind of warmth.
Making an argument. He was telling an entire industry, in public, that its hiring orthodoxy was wrong — that the person who could sell did not need a certificate saying so. The show was the proof, performed weekly.
Very few founders would think to solve recruitment, brand-building and an industry-wide thesis with a single television format. Fewer still would have the nerve to fund it, produce it, and personally scout the contestants. Sachdev did all three, and treated it as obvious. Press profiles that later counted Kunwer Sachdev among Huron’s most respected entrepreneurs rarely lingered on the television gamble — but the gamble was pure Sachdev.
What it says about the company he built
The dealer network that carried Su-Kam across the country, the service teams, the regional leaders — much of that human machine was staffed by exactly the type of person Sales Ka Bazigar was built to celebrate: people with the instinct, not necessarily the credential. The show was the public face of a private conviction that ran through the whole company, the same conviction that won it three consecutive HR awards: that talent is widely distributed and badly measured, and that a company willing to look where others would not could simply find it lying around, unclaimed.
The man who once needed someone to give him a chance spent a good part of his peak building stages on which other people could earn theirs. He is, mercifully, still doing it — mentoring founders now at Su-vastika and through the AI second act. For the wider public record on the founder, see also Kunwer Sachdev on Wikipedia, and the independent essay on entrepreneurs who didn’t need an MBA.
Other companies wrote job descriptions. He wrote a television show — and then went and found the people the job descriptions would have thrown away.
By a former associate of Kunwer Sachdev
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