The €100 million growth opportunity hiding in the wrong outlets
In our experience, some of the largest growth opportunities we uncover at Globalpraxis are not hidden in new channels or new geographies. They are hidden in outlets already served by our clients – but with the wrong level of attention, the wrong portfolio, or the wrong commercial model.
This is one of the more counterintuitive findings in route-to-market work.
Most companies have a very clear view of where their sales are today. They know which customers are the largest, which distributors move the most volume, and which channels account for the majority of revenue.
What is much harder to see is where sales should be.
That distinction matters, because current sales tell you what happened but not necessarily where the opportunity is.
And in large consumer businesses, the gap between the two can be enormous.
Big customers don’t always mean big opportunities
We often see commercial organizations naturally gravitate towards their largest customers. It makes sense. They represent significant revenue, they are visible internally, and they often have dedicated account teams. But size and opportunity are not the same thing.
A customer generating €1 million today may already be close to its realistic potential. Another generating €300,000 may have the capacity to double.
If both are managed primarily according to their current sales, the first customer will typically receive more attention. However, the latter may be where the real growth is.
This sounds obvious when written down. In practice, it is one of the hardest things for commercial organizations to manage consistently, because historical sales are easy to measure – potential is not.
We look for the gap
When we work on RTM transformations at Globalpraxis, one of the questions we spend considerable time on is relatively simple: Where is the meaningful gap between what an outlet sells today and what it could reasonably sell tomorrow?
That gap can come from many places.
An outlet may be missing an important part of the portfolio, its assortment failing to reflect the consumers it actually serves. A category may be underdeveloped compared to similar outlets. Possibly because the customer receives too few visits. Or, in some cases, it may receive too many because the service model does not fit the economics of the account.
Sometimes the opportunity is obvious once you know where to look. Often it isn't.
A traditional sales report may show two customers with similar revenue and growth. But once you compare their location, traffic patterns, category mix, shopper profile, nearby outlets, and historical response to commercial activity, their future potential can look very different.
That is the difference between managing sales and managing opportunity.
The wrong outlet can mean two different things
When we talk about “the wrong outlets,” we don't simply mean outlets where a company should not be present. Quite often, the issue is subtler
Some outlets are receiving too much commercial investment relative to their potential; others are receiving too little.
A sales representative may visit a mature customer every week because that has always been the frequency. Meanwhile, another outlet with significantly greater headroom is visited once a month.
A distributor may prioritize customers that generate easy volume, even if those customers offer limited incremental potential.
Trade spending may continue to flow toward accounts that have historically performed well, while emerging opportunities struggle to receive attention because they are still small.
Individually, none of these decisions look dramatic. Across 50,000 or 100,000 outlets, they quickly add up.
That is how a commercial system can appear efficient and yet leave a substantial amount of growth untouched.
The opportunity is not always to do more
This is an important point.
When companies identify underdeveloped outlets, the instinct is often to add activity. More visits. More promotions. More trade investment. More people.
We do not believe that is always the answer.
In many of the situations we encounter, the bigger opportunity comes from reallocation.
Take resources away from places where they are producing limited incremental return and redirect them towards customers where they can genuinely change the outcome.
That might mean increasing service frequency for one group of outlets and reducing it for another. Or it could mean any number of other opportunities, like changing the portfolio sold through a particular channel, using a distributor differently, or moving some customers from a high-cost service model to a more efficient one.
The objective is not maximum commercial activity. It is rather maximum commercial productivity.
Granularity like this changes the economics
Ten or fifteen years ago, managing opportunity at this level was difficult.
Most companies had to rely on broad segmentation: Modern trade vs. traditional trade, convenience vs. foodservice, large vs. medium vs. small.
These categories were useful because they made a complex market manageable. The problem is that the customers within those categories are often anything but similar.
Today, the combination of much richer commercial data, external information, analytics, and AI allows us to go significantly deeper.
We can compare outlets against genuinely relevant peers, identify where sales are unexpectedly low, estimate which customers are likely to respond to additional commercial investment, and distinguish between an outlet that is small because it has limited potential and one that is small because its potential has not yet been captured.
For us, this is one of the most powerful changes taking place in route-to-market.
It moves the conversation away from broad channel strategy and towards the economics of individual opportunities.
How does this become a €100 million question?
Not through one big initiative – usually just the opposite.
It comes from finding relatively small gaps across a very large commercial system.
An additional product in the right outlet. A better assortment in another. A different visit frequency. A stronger activation. A more appropriate service model. A customer that has been overlooked because its historical sales were too small to attract attention.
If each individual opportunity is worth only a few thousand euros, it may not look particularly important. But when similar opportunities exist across tens of thousands of customers, the mathematics changes.
For a large consumer business, it is entirely possible for the cumulative value to reach tens or even hundreds of millions.
The challenge is to see it.
A question we like to ask commercial teams
We often ask: If your sales force had 20% more time tomorrow, where would you send them?
It is a surprisingly difficult question. Not because commercial teams do not know their markets. They usually do – and extremely well.
The difficulty is that many organizations do not have a sufficiently granular and objective view of where the next euro of commercial effort will generate the highest return.
That is the capability we believe companies need to build.
At Globalpraxis, we increasingly see route-to-market less as a question of coverage and more as a question of resource allocation.
Where should we invest? Where should we stop investing? Which outlets deserve a different model?
And where is the growth hiding that our current way of looking at the market simply does not reveal?
Because the biggest opportunity in your market may not be a customer you have not yet reached.
It may be a customer you already serve – but have never really understood.
