Colgate Palmolive - Customer Development Officer

April 2010 - October 2011

I joined Colgate Palmolive straight out of my MBA and was sent to Bihar for field training.

Going from air-conditioned classrooms to the hot, dusty markets of urban and rural Bihar, where summer temperatures touched 45-48°C, was a jolt. But it was also where I learned how the FMCG business actually works on the ground.

The training had three phases. The first was in Patna, where I worked as a distributor salesman - visiting markets, taking orders, ensuring stock got delivered to retailers. I learned the distribution chain from the inside: what the distributor paid the company (primary), what he charged the market (secondary), how credit was extended, how schemes were implemented, how prices were calculated, how offers were structured, how stock moved and much more.

The second phase took me to Saharsa district, where I worked as a Pilot Sales Representative out of a super distributor point, covering substockists spread across rural Bihar. It was here that I had my first real introduction to how the market sizes you up.

I showed up to one of the urban stockists for a market visit dressed in formals, as you do when you're fresh out of an MBA. He looked me up and down and said one word: "Company?" I said yes. He didn't respond. He simply turned and called out to one of his salesmen, rattling off the name of a market route he wanted the salesman to take me on. I didn't know it then, but he had picked one of the worst routes available - a five kilometre stretch with shops few and far between, in 45°C heat, with no shade to speak of. I put on a cap to protect my head from the sun and went.

We worked the entire route. Took orders. Covered every shop. I was tired by the end of it, but not so done that I couldn't sit down and have a proper discussion with the distributor when we got back. He was visibly surprised. What made it more pointed was that the salesman - someone who walked these markets every single day - came back with a heat stroke. The distributor got the message. After that, the conversation between us was different.

The third phase was Bhagalpur, where I was handed a live territory for two months and asked to run it as a CDO. It was too short a time to accomplish any significant sales growth but I did add value. I mapped all the market routes, identified distribution gaps, found that the super distributor was pushing stock into the open market rather than through the proper substockist network, trained salesmen, executed displays, and compiled a full territory report.

At the end of training, I presented my findings to Colgate's Eastern Regional Management in Kolkata. I was the only one from my cohort who completed the program and made it to that stage and that felt significant at the time.

After training, I was assigned the Cooch Behar territory in North Bengal, with a monthly billing value of ₹48 lakhs. The territory had five functioning distributor relationships: Gaurishankar Agency in Cooch Behar town, an urban distributor and super stockist in Jalpaiguri, a super stockist in Alipurduar and an urban distributor in Jaigaon through who an informal cross-border arrangement operated pushing stock into Bhutan. Apart from this there were two distributors in Bhutan - Tashi Corporation and Food Corporation of Bhutan - who were inactive. More on that later.

Gaurishankar was well-run. I learned a lot from watching how he operated - what a good distributorship looks like when it's firing on all cylinders.

Jalpaiguri was a different story. The distributor there, North Bengal Paper Agency, had held the Colgate franchise for some fifty years. The owner had been bedridden since a serious accident and had the sympathy of the local business community. His wife managed day-to-day operations while he pulled the strings from the background.

The problems were fairly systematic - trade offers weren't being passed on to retailers, display payments were being claimed but displays weren't going up, and the billing software Colgate required all distributors to use was being bypassed for handwritten invoices. Market coverage sat at around 30–40%, with the shortfall explained away as credit risk.

I knew going in aggressively without a solid case would backfire. So I took my time. I spent about 4-5 months visiting every market, building direct relationships with retailers, handing out over 200 business cards so they could reach me directly, and documenting everything - missed displays, withheld offers, invoice irregularities, unserviced market routes. It was slow, methodical work. But by the time I presented the evidence to management, the case was airtight. The decision was to terminate the distributorship.

The response was immediate. He threatened to bring in the local union and shut down business across North Bengal. We sat through several union meetings with a lot of threatening language across the table. What was interesting, though, was that many of those same union members were calling me privately - expressing interest in taking on the distributorship themselves and in return, offering to take our side in the negotiations. The situation eventually resolved itself when the owner publicly abused his own union members, after which they withdrew their support entirely. We appointed a new distributor - a young, driven businessman who was actively building his portfolio. Market coverage went from 30–40% to around 75%. Offers started reaching retailers. Displays went up. The retailers were happy. They were finally getting paid for putting up displays, and the product was actually available. The business responded.

The Bhutan situation was one I had inherited but couldn't leave alone. The informal channel through the Jaigaon border distributor was sending about ₹3-4 lakhs worth of stock a month into what was, after all, an entire country. My ASM's view was straightforward. Direct business with Bhutan wasn't worth pursuing. It had been tried before and it hadn't worked.

I didn't see it that way.

When I crossed the border and sat down with Food Corporation of Bhutan and Tashi Corporation - both large, well-established businesses with reach across most of Bhutan - what I heard was pretty shocking. Previous CDOs had been using the Bhutan distributors as a dumping ground for SKUs they couldn't move through their regular Indian distributors. The Bhutanese distributors would order one thing and receive something else entirely. Over time, their warehouses had filled up with dead, expired stock they couldn't sell and couldn't return. Their working capital was locked up.

And Colgate's position, based on the version of events that had reached management, was that the stock couldn't be taken back. The narrative upstream was simply that the distributors weren't performing. The real story had never made it through.

I documented everything, photographed the dead stock, and requested the Area Sales Manager to come down to the territory and hear it directly from the distributors. No only him, but the RSM also came down. Once they had the full picture, management agreed to make an exception. They took back the dead stock and reimbursed the distributors.

FCB and Tashi placed their first direct order shortly after: ₹15–17 lakhs, compared to the ₹3–4 lakhs the informal channel had been generating. The company then worked on extending Colgate's standard trade offer and display structure into Bhutan, navigating the cross-border financial and operational logistics that came with doing business in another country.

By the time I left for my next role, I saw a full operational plan for how promotions, offers, and displays would work in the Bhutan market going forward.

The territory had grown from ₹48 lakhs to approximately ₹55 lakhs a month. I was also part of the drive that expanded coverage into medical stores as part of an early FMCG push into that channel.

It had been a year and a half of constant travel, difficult negotiations, and more than a few moments where things could have gone the other way. But looking back, the Cooch Behar territory was where I really learned what the job was about.