-
Client
Marico
-
Service
Sales Strategy & UX Research
-
Industry
FMCG & Consumer Goods
-
Company Size
50,000+
The client
Client is a household brand in India, if you oil your body or love cooking food – you surely have interacted with the brand. Behind every high-performing field sales organisation is a complex web of behavioural, operational, and motivational factors that determine how supervisors spend their time, what drives their effort, and whether their daily decisions are aligned with the commercial outcomes the business needs. For a major Indian FMCG brand managing thousands of Territory Sales Executives and Officers across a national distribution network, understanding and redesigning these factors was not an academic exercise — it was a revenue imperative, as supervisor productivity had begun to slow relative to sales targets in key markets across India.
The problem
The business identified a widening gap between sales targets and achieved performance across its field sales supervisor tier in India — but the causes were not immediately visible in commercial data alone. What was needed was a deep behavioural investigation into the operational, structural, and motivational factors shaping supervisor performance — and a design response addressing the real barriers to productivity rather than the assumed ones.
- Supervisor Productivity Declining Against Sales Targets in India — Performance data showed a consistent and growing gap between sales targets and achieved results among Territory Sales Executives and Supervisors across key Indian markets. The causes were not apparent from commercial metrics, and a deeper investigation into the factors shaping field behaviour was required to identify the right interventions.
- Behavioural and Motivational Barriers to Performance Poorly Understood — The business lacked a systematic understanding of the emotional, operational, and motivational factors influencing supervisor performance across India — making it impossible to design effective interventions. Generic training and process improvements had failed to move the needle, suggesting the barriers were behavioural rather than technical.
- Gap Between System Demands and What the System Returns to Users — Field sales supervisors were being asked to operate a system demanding significant effort — data entry, reporting, beat plan adherence — without providing proportional value back in terms of visibility, coaching, or reward. This imbalance was eroding motivation and creating compliance that was technically adequate but commercially insufficient.
OUR SOLUTION
Worxwide conducted immersive field studies — shadowing Territory Sales Executives and Officers throughout their working days across India to observe natural work patterns and decision-making in context. Detailed stakeholder interviews explored workflows, responsibilities, and expectations, building a comprehensive behavioural map of the gap between system demands and human reality. The insights generated a set of behavioral design frameworks, restructured loyalty and incentive programmes, and a redesigned field sales app aligning system requirements with the motivational and operational realities of the people using it.
- Immersive Field Shadowing Across TSE/TSO Personas Across India — Day-long field shadowing studies with Territory Sales Executives and Officers across multiple Indian markets generated the behavioural and operational insights that no amount of survey research or data analysis could have produced — capturing the authentic realities of how supervisors spent their time and made commercial decisions.
- Behavioural Design Frameworks for Sales Performance Improvement — The research findings were translated into behavioral design frameworks — drawing on motivational psychology, habit formation, and behavioural economics — identifying the specific design changes most likely to improve supervisor engagement, effort quality, and commercial decision-making across India.
- Restructured Loyalty Programmes and Field Sales App Redesign — Loyalty and incentive programmes were restructured to provide more immediate, transparent connections between daily behaviour and reward — addressing the motivational deficit created by delayed, opaque incentive structures. The field sales app was redesigned to reduce friction, improve information visibility, and provide supervisors with the tools they actually needed.
Our work in action
The Impact
15% Increase in Field Sales Productivity Across India
The behavioural design interventions — spanning motivational redesign, app improvements, and loyalty restructuring — delivered a 15% improvement in field sales supervisor productivity, demonstrating that behavioural science applied to commercial tool design could achieve what operational process improvements alone had failed to accomplish.
Improved Alignment Between System Demands and Human Motivation
The redesigned system gave field sales supervisors a better bargain — asking for their engagement and effort while returning visible value through better visibility, clearer performance feedback, and more responsive incentive structures. This alignment drove sustainable performance improvement rather than compliance-driven short-term gains.
Evidence-Based Commercial Design for the Field Sales Organisation
The programme established a model for evidence-based, behaviourally informed commercial tool design applicable to future sales technology investments — ensuring the gap between operational design and human reality would not reopen as the organisation evolved across India.
