Over the past five years I have sat across the table from leadership teams at 43 FMCG and CPG companies. Different sizes, different categories, different countries. The conversation always lands in the same place. Should we go wide or should we go deep.
It sounds like a strategic question. It is not. It is a sequencing problem. And almost everyone gets the sequence wrong.
Width is not a strategy. It is what happens when depth is done right.
The Question Everyone Asks
Going wide means expanding distribution. More outlets, more territories, more shelf presence. The logic is simple. If your product is in more places, more people can buy it. Revenue follows reach.
Going deep means concentrating on fewer outlets and winning harder at each one. Better relationships with retailers, stronger shelf position, higher per outlet sales. The logic here is also simple. If you are winning where you already are, the numbers take care of themselves.
Every sales leadership conversation I have been part of treats this as a choice. As though a company must pick one direction and commit. Wide or deep. Coverage or penetration. Reach or intensity.
The companies that consistently outperform do not pick either. They just never do them in the wrong order.
What The 43 Meetings Revealed
I was not looking for a pattern when these meetings started. The conversations were about digitizing sales operations, automating field reporting, building visibility into secondary sales. Standard operational work.
But by the time I had sat through the fifteenth or sixteenth meeting, the pattern was impossible to ignore.
The companies that were struggling almost always had the same story. They had expanded aggressively. New territories. New distributors. New outlets by the hundreds. The coverage maps looked impressive. The numbers told a different story.
They had gone wide before they had figured out how to win where they already were.
Per outlet revenue was declining. Visit quality was falling because the same number of reps was now covering more ground with less time at each stop. Retailer relationships were thinner. Shelf compliance was worse. Out of stock rates were climbing. The operation was wider. It was not better.
The companies that were growing steadily, sometimes with smaller teams and tighter budgets, had a different shape to their operation. They had fewer outlets but they were winning at a higher percentage of them. Their reps spent more time per visit. Their retailers reordered more consistently. Their shelf position was stronger.
They had depth. And when they eventually expanded, the width held. Because they knew what winning looked like before they tried to replicate it.
The Depth Problem Nobody Sees
Here is what going wide before going deep actually costs.
A rep covering 80 outlets cannot give the same attention as one covering 40. The visits get shorter. The conversations get shallower. The merchandising gets skipped. The outlet count grows but the quality of each interaction shrinks. On paper the coverage is up. In practice the brand presence at each outlet is weaker than it was before the expansion.
New outlets get added. Existing outlets quietly stop reordering. Nobody notices because the total outlet count is still growing. The coverage number goes up. The reorder rate at the original base goes down. Both things are true at the same time and the blended number hides the second one completely. Width creates the illusion of growth while the foundation erodes underneath it.
When a company expands to 500 outlets and measures average revenue per outlet, the number gets dragged down by the hundreds of new outlets that have not matured yet. Leadership looks at the average and thinks the whole operation is underperforming. It is not. The original 200 outlets might be fine. The new 300 are just too young to produce yet. But the blended number hides both truths and the response is usually to push harder everywhere instead of nurturing where it matters.
What Depth Actually Looks Like
Depth is not just fewer outlets. That is a common misread. A company with 50 outlets and poor execution at all of them does not have depth. It has a small operation with the same problems a large one would have.
Depth is a per outlet condition. It means the brand is winning at the specific location where the product sits.
Not *how many outlets carry the product* but how many outlets are actively selling it.
Not *is the product on the shelf* but is it in the right position, at the right stock level, with a retailer who recommends it.
Not *did the rep visit* but did the visit produce a measurable change in what the shelf looks like.
I worked with one operation that had 1,200 outlets on paper but only 340 were producing meaningful recurring revenue. The other 860 were what the field team called courtesy listings. The product was there. It was not moving. Nobody was actively working those outlets because the reps did not have time. They were too busy driving between 1,200 pins on a map to spend real time at any of them.
When the company pulled back to the 340 and redirected effort there, per outlet revenue climbed 22 percent in one quarter. Not because the product changed. Because the attention did.
They did not shrink the business. They stopped pretending the other 860 outlets were part of it.
The Sequence That Works
The companies I have seen get this right follow the same pattern even though none of them describe it the same way.
They start with a territory small enough to win clearly. Not the whole market. A region. A city. Sometimes just a channel within a city.
They figure out what winning looks like at the outlet level. What visit frequency drives reorders. What shelf position produces the best pull through. What stock levels prevent out of stocks without creating overstock. What the rep needs to do during each visit to move the needle.
They do this until the model is repeatable. Until a new rep can be trained on it and produce a similar result. Until the per outlet economics are proven and the retailer confidence pattern is established.
Then they go wide. And when they do, the width holds. Because they are not just adding outlets. They are replicating a system that already works.
Width without a proven depth model is just distribution. Width with a proven depth model is growth.
Why It Goes Wrong
The reason most companies skip the depth step is not because they do not understand it. It is because depth is slow and boards are not patient.
Going wide produces visible numbers fast. More outlets. More invoices. More primary sales. The growth story looks good in a quarterly deck. The fact that per outlet performance is declining gets buried in the aggregate.
Going deep produces invisible progress first. Retailer confidence builds slowly. Shelf compliance improves gradually. Per outlet revenue ticks up in a way that does not make headlines. The growth story is boring until the compounding kicks in. And by then, the company that went wide first is already dealing with a distribution network that is a mile wide and an inch deep, trying to fix retention problems that never would have existed if they had built the foundation before expanding the footprint.
Of the 43 companies I met with, the ones that had the most painful sales operations were not the smallest. They were the ones that had grown the fastest without a system for making each outlet work before adding the next one.
The Real Answer
The question is not whether to go wide or go deep. Every company eventually needs to do both.
The question is which one comes first. And the answer, in every operation I have seen that is working well, is the same.
Depth first. Width second. Always.
Not because depth is more important than width in the abstract. But because width without depth is a structure with no foundation. It looks like growth until you inspect it. And by the time you inspect it the cost of fixing it is five times what it would have been to build it right.
The companies that dominate shelves did not start by trying to be everywhere. They started by trying to win somewhere. And they did not expand until they knew exactly what winning looked like.