Area Sales Executive

Role

Area Sales Executive

Experience

2–4 years in FMCG general trade, in a field role

Location

Gurugram. This is a field role — most of your week is spent in the market, not at a desk.

Ashnoor is a mustard oil brand run by a family that has been in this trade since 1998. For twenty years we sold other people's oil across a counter in Agra. That is long enough to learn which names a shopkeeper reaches for without being asked, and which ones he has to talk a customer into. In 2018 we put our own name on a bottle.

That is a harder thing than it sounds. A family does not walk in and ask for mustard oil. They ask for the one they had last time — wahi wala dena. Earning that one sentence is the entire business. It is why we would rather be plain about what is in the pack than clever about what it does. We make no health promises and no miracle claims. We promise the same oil, in the same pack, every time, carrying a batch code that leads back to a person who answers for it.

We are still a small house. These roles are open because the work has outgrown the people doing it — not because a deck said to hire. Whoever takes these seats will set how a young brand behaves for a long time.

Ashnoor does not win a kitchen with an advertisement. It wins one when a shopkeeper hands over our bottle instead of the one sitting beside it — because he has stock, he trusts the pack, and the last three cartons moved. That handover is the whole business, and it happens or does not happen in about four seconds, at a counter someone has to be standing in front of.

This role owns those four seconds across a set of beats. You are not a delivery arm for the distributor. You are the person who knows which of your outlets sold what last month, which one is quietly pushing a cheaper loose fill and why, and which one will take a second pack size if you ask him on a Tuesday instead of a Saturday.

If you like the market — the noise, the arguing, the tea, the ledger kept in a diary — this is a good seat. If you would rather work the territory from a spreadsheet, it is not.

2–4 years selling a packaged food or FMCG product through general trade, in a field role. Edible oil, staples or kitchen commodities is a real advantage — you will already know how this shelf behaves.

Beyond the years

• You have personally run a beat, not only supervised one. You can build a beat plan from an outlet list and defend why an outlet is on it.
• You can read a shopkeeper — when he means no, when he means later, and when he means make it worth my while.
• You can work out a retailer's margin on a scheme in your head, and you know when a scheme is buying volume rather than earning it.
• You can travel your territory daily and you are comfortable being in the market for most of the week.
• You write a short, plain report — what sold, what did not, and what you are doing about it. Three honest lines beat three neat pages.

• Your field experience is mostly institutional, B2B or wholesale-only. This is retail counter work and the muscles are different.
• You need a strong brand pull behind you to open a new outlet. In most of this market we are still a young name — the first order comes from you, not from recall.
• You treat reporting as paperwork that follows the job, rather than as part of it.

Coverage holds without anyone reminding you. Your productive-call ratio climbs quarter on quarter. Outlets you opened are still billing three months later instead of having ordered once for a scheme. Your distributor's claims are current and clean. And when we call a shopkeeper on your beat, he knows your name.