The Distributor Behind the Curtain

Rajesh manages 14 markets from the Dubai office of a mid-size Indian personal care company. He's been in the role for three years. Before that, he was a key account manager in Mumbai — one brand, one retailer, one city.

Now he has 14 countries, 14 distributors, 14 different trade structures, and one Excel file that he updates manually every month based on whatever the distributors feel like reporting.

For the first two years, things were fine. Orders came in. Revenue was stable. Nobody asked too many questions because the international division was still small — a nice addition to the domestic business, not a strategic pillar.

Then the CEO set a target: international should be 25% of revenue within three years. Currently, it's 11%.

Suddenly, everyone wants to know about the 14 markets. "Why is Saudi flat?" "Why did Turkey drop?" "What is the distributor in Kenya doing?" Rajesh doesn't know. He has never been to Kenya. His distributor there sends an order every quarter and a payment 90 days later. That's the entirety of the relationship.

He asked the Saudi distributor for sell-out data last month. The response: "We don't share that. It's confidential." He asked the Turkey distributor why volumes dropped. The response: "The market is difficult." That was the full explanation.

Rajesh suspects the Kenya distributor is also selling competitor products and prioritizing them. He suspects the Saudi distributor's retail price is 40% above where it should be, killing any chance of rotation. He suspects the Turkey distributor is sitting on inventory from last year's promotion that was never executed.

He suspects a lot. He knows nothing.

And in six weeks, he has to present a growth plan for international to the board. A plan based on 14 markets he cannot see into, with partners he cannot evaluate, in channels he cannot monitor.

What keeps Rajesh awake:

• Accountable for 14 markets with no visibility into any of them
• Distributors who share nothing — or share only what makes them look good
• No framework to evaluate distributor performance: no scorecards, no benchmarks
• Growing pressure from the board to deliver growth from a base he can't diagnose
• The risk of making wrong decisions — cutting a good distributor, keeping a bad one — because he has no data, only gut feeling