The signs that your business model needs intervention
You don't need a crisis to justify reviewing the model. These are the signals that distributors who work with TMC describe before we start:
-
You have routes that generate volume, but when you calculate the real cost—salesperson, freight, downtime, returns—they don't justify what they cost. Nobody has done that calculation rigorously because the numbers are spread across different cost centers.
-
Your sales team works more hours than three years ago but results per salesperson are not improving in the same proportion. The structure grew, but the processes did not.
-
You have clients who order a lot, pay late, and generate more work than profit. And you have small customers that no one visits often enough because "they're not worth the trip," even though together they represent a significant portion of the volume.
-
Your main manufacturer is pressuring you with coverage and execution targets at the point of sale that your team can't consistently meet — not for lack of effort, but because the route isn't designed for that.
If any of these situations describe your operation today, the problem isn't in the market or your team. It's in the architecture of your business model.
How we help distributors improve their business operations
We don't arrive with a generic distribution manual. We get to know how your specific business operates—your routes, your portfolio, your team, your customers—and from there we design and implement the changes.
The work is organized into three areas that are almost always connected:
Profitability by route and customer segmentation
The first step is to know how much each route earns and how much each customer is worth. Not in terms of volume—in terms of actual margin after allocating all costs.
This exercise, which we at TMC do in the diagnostic phase, almost always produces surprises by identifying between 30% and 50% of the routes that are destroying value without anyone having quantified it.
With that visibility, we redesigned customer segmentation, adjusted visit frequencies by segment, and restructured the portfolio mix by route so that each stop justifies its cost.
Sales team structure and productivity
Most productivity problems in distributor sales teams are not motivation problems.
These are design problems: poorly defined roles, poorly assigned territories, KPIs that measure what is easy to measure instead of what matters, and management routines that either don't exist or don't work.
We evaluate the entire structure — roles, incentives, management processes, indicators — and design the model that allows the current team to generate more with less friction.
Relationship with manufacturers and execution at the point of sale
A distributor who doesn't execute well at the point of sale loses negotiating power with their manufacturers every year. And a manufacturer who doesn't provide commercial support to their distributor creates unprofitable routes that end up being a problem for both parties.
We work on designing the success picture by store type, on the execution monitoring processes, and where relevant, on structuring the business relationship with the main manufacturers so that the incentives are aligned.
Results from distributor projects
In commercial model diagnostic and redesign projects with distributors in Mexico and Latin America, we consistently identify that between 30% and 50% of active routes are unprofitable when full cost is allocated. Intervention on those routes has generated margin improvements of 4 to 8 percentage points within 6 to 12 months.
In commercial team restructuring projects, the average increase in productivity per salesperson has been between 20% and 35% in the first six months of operating under the new model.
What makes TMC different
We don't deliver a diagnostic and leave. We stay until the changes are working inside your operation — with your real team, in your real routes.
That means at the end of the project you don't have a document. You have a model that your team understands, that is implemented in the field, and that has the KPIs and management routines to sustain it without depending on TMC.
Free resources for manufacturers and distributors
Two tools that TMC makes available to you so that you can move forward with your distribution model.
Is your distribution operation leaving margin on the table?
The first step is a 30-minute conversation. No introductions, no pre-arranged proposals. Just a conversation to understand where the bottleneck is in your operation and whether TMC can help you solve it.
We work with mass consumer goods distributors in Latin America, the USA, and Spain. If your operation has any of the symptoms described above, this is the right conversation for you.