Why ‘more salespeople’ is not the answer in emerging markets

Emerging markets are often described as the next big growth frontier. With billions of consumers, rising incomes, and expanding urbanisation, the opportunity looks irresistible. Yet for many multinational firms, the reality on the ground is sobering. Products are strong, brands are visible, and demand exists, but sales stall. The problem, our research shows, is rarely a lack of demand. It is execution.

In fragmented retail environments like India, growth is frequently constrained not by product-market fit, but by how firms organise and deploy their sales effort at the last mile. Simply adding more salespeople, increasing visit frequency, or pushing more SKUs into every outlet often backfires. The question is not how much effort firms deploy, but how intelligently they deploy it. This insight forms the core of our recently published study in the Journal of Strategic Marketing, which examines how multinational firms can redesign their route-to-market strategies to perform better in complex emerging-market retail systems.

The core idea: Rethinking route-to-market from the inside out

Most discussions on distribution in emerging markets focus on external challenges, such as weak infrastructure, institutional voids, fragmented retail, or cash-constrained shopkeepers. While these constraints are real, they overlook an equally important dimension: the firm’s internal design choices. Our research focuses on what we refer to as channel-facing internal segmentation.

Instead of deploying a single, uniform sales force to push the entire product portfolio across all outlets, some firms are now breaking their sales effort into modular units. Dedicated sales teams or visit cycles are assigned to specific product portfolios and outlet clusters, based on what those outlets can realistically absorb. In simple terms: not every outlet needs the same products, the same attention, or the same intensity of engagement.

We studied this phenomenon through an exploratory field study of Indian retail outlets, complemented by a large-scale simulation model encompassing nearly 300,000 retail scenarios. This allowed us to systematically test how different salesforce configurations perform across outlet types, market sizes, and capital conditions.

What the results reveal

Three insights stand out, and they are explained below:

1. Segmentation works, but not everywhere in the same way

Segmenting sales effort across product portfolios consistently improves performance compared to a ‘one-size-fits-all’ salesforce. However, the gains are not uniform. High-capacity outlets, such as food and beverage chains with greater shelf space and faster throughput, benefit the most. These outlets can absorb focused attention, stock wider assortments, and convert sales visits into meaningful volume. Smaller formats, such as kirana stores and paan outlets, also benefit from segmentation, but the returns are smaller. Their physical and financial constraints limit the amount of incremental effort that can be monetised. The implication is clear: segmentation is a lever, not a silver bullet. Its value depends on outlet readiness.

2. Capital constraints matter, but less than we think

A common assumption in emerging markets is that liquidity constraints are the dominant bottleneck. While working capital does moderate performance, our findings indicate that format and throughput are more significant than capital alone. Even in cash-constrained settings, segmentation improves outcomes, though the marginal gains are reduced. This suggests that better internal alignment can partially compensate for external financial frictions. For managers, this reframes the problem: instead of waiting for perfect credit systems or retailer financing solutions, firms can redesign their sales architecture to work with existing constraints.

3. More focus is good; too much focus is not

Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding concerns effort variance, i.e., how unevenly sales attention is distributed across product portfolios. Moderate prioritisation boosts performance. But excessive skew, i.e., where one portfolio gets almost all the attention, reduces overall results. Why? Because extreme focus creates blind spots. Secondary portfolios suffer, retailer engagement weakens, and sales teams experience coordination fatigue. In other words, strategic focus has diminishing returns. The optimal strategy lies between uniform effort and aggressive concentration.

Why this matters for managers today

The managerial takeaway is not ‘segment everything immediately’. It is more nuanced.

First, firms should treat route-to-market design as a strategic choice, not an operational afterthought. How sales teams are structured, incentivised, and deployed can serve as a substitute for missing infrastructure in emerging markets.

Second, segmentation should be selective and iterative. Starting with high-capacity outlets or priority portfolios allows firms to learn and scale without overwhelming the organisation.

Third, managers must resist the temptation to over-optimise. Data-driven prioritisation is powerful, but excessive skew can undermine long-term performance and brand presence.

Finally, internal architecture matters as much as external conditions. Firms often cannot quickly change retail fragmentation or capital constraints, but they can change how they organise their efforts.

A broader reflection

Emerging markets are not simply ‘scaled-down’ versions of developed ones. They demand different logics of execution. Our study suggests that competitive advantage increasingly comes from organisational design choices that are sensitive to local realities. Rather than asking how to push more products through weak systems, firms should ask how to reconfigure themselves to work within those systems more intelligently.

For students, managers, and policymakers alike, the message is simple: growth in emerging markets is less about brute force and more about architectural finesse.

And sometimes, doing better starts not by doing more, but by doing things differently.