FMCG

Keep Pace with Consumers and Shoppers

The FMCG landscape is demanding. Rapidly changing consumer preferences, increasing pressure to work more productively, and digital disruptions are just some of the trends driving this shift. To consistently create customer value, sales leaders must not only excel at quickly building and managing customer relationships. They must also work smoothly with internal stakeholders, such as marketing and category management.

How dynamic that interplay needs to be is evident from large-scale research in the Journal of Marketing (Gielens & Steenkamp, 2025), based on more than 16,000 brands across 85 FMCG categories in 34 countries. The key conclusion: for 98.5% of brands, the effectiveness of price, assortment, or distribution shifts measurably over time. A category approach that worked two years ago therefore often no longer works the same way. This means a sales leader in FMCG cannot lock in a winning formula for price, shelf, and distribution just once, but must continuously recalibrate — and organize the team accordingly.

The shopper is changing too. Other research (Bollinger, Kronthal-Sacco & Zhu, 2025) shows that a growing share of revenue growth in US FMCG now comes from products with an explicit sustainability claim. Sales and category management must therefore not only move faster, but also shift toward different values than a few years ago.

SalesQuarters has a proven track record in attracting sales leaders and high potentials for this dynamic. This is grounded in deep insight into the supplier-customer relationship and knowing where sales priorities lie — insight we built up, among others, with clients such as Unilever, Heineken, and L'Oréal.