Mumbai: Scale Sherpas, founded in 2024 by FMCG industry veterans Anjana Ghosh, Atanu Gangoly, and Priyanka Gupta, has announced the launch of Smart Force, a shared mobility–led field force model designed to help FMCG brands scale faster and more efficiently across India’s complex retail landscape.
India’s FMCG market is valued at over ₹9 lakh crore, with General Trade accounting for nearly 65 percent of sales through more than 6.5 million kirana stores, while Modern Trade contributes around 10 percent and is growing rapidly in urban and premium segments. Despite strong products and founder-led innovation, many high-potential FMCG brands struggle at the same inflection point—scaling distribution, building field capability, and institutionalising execution in a fragmented and high-risk environment.
In General Trade, execution challenges often arise from gaps in outlet coverage data, weak distributor coordination, and low digital adoption. When addressed through siloed teams, these issues tend to increase costs and operational inefficiencies. Against this backdrop, shared workforce models are emerging as a viable alternative, enabling FMCG companies to flexibly deploy sales execution, merchandising, analytics, and demand planning resources while improving productivity and speed to market.
Smart Force has been designed to address these challenges through a ready-to-deploy execution model that includes shared on-ground sales teams, pre-mapped routes, and standardised execution processes. This enables brands to activate across multiple cities simultaneously without the need to build and manage large in-house sales organisations.
According to Scale Sherpas, brands using Smart Force can compress expansion timelines from the traditional 6–9 months to as little as 45 days, improve numeric distribution through stronger secondary sales execution, and reduce go-to-market costs by up to 40 percent compared to conventional in-house models.
The initiative is led by Anjana Ghosh, Managing Director, Scale Sherpas, who brings decades of experience in building and scaling high-performance sales and distribution networks across Indian markets. Smart Force draws heavily from frontline execution insights, with a strong focus on speed, efficiency, and control at the market level.
“Brands don’t need another strategy framework, they need execution that works consistently on the ground,” said Anjana Ghosh, Managing Director, Scale Sherpas. “Smart Force is built from years of hands-on experience. Most brands insist on owning their on-ground sales teams, even as they struggle to manage them effectively. The reality is that the last-mile sales force is often underpaid, disengaged, and operationally invisible to leadership. With repetitive work and no real career path, expecting ownership, empathy, or productivity becomes unrealistic. Sales leaders and HR teams remain stuck firefighting attrition and inefficiency, mistaking control for capability. The uncomfortable truth is that brands don’t have an execution problem, they have a people-model problem at the last mile.”
