Why FMCG brands stall between ₹100 and ₹400 crore

After three decades in FMCG, Suresh Ramachandran has distilled his go-to-market experience into a first book, My Way Is the SURE Way: A Practitioner’s GTM Playbook for FMCG Founders & Leadership Teams. It is written for founders and sales leaders of consumer businesses in the ₹100–400 crore range — a stage where Ramachandran argues the playbook that built the business can quietly become its ceiling.

Segment before you scale

The book is organised around the SURE framework, a four-step sequence for disciplined go-to-market work:

• Segment: identify and prioritise markets, customers and growth opportunities.
• Understand: read consumers, channels and market conditions.
• Reach: design the route to market.
• Execute: translate strategy into consistent on-ground action.

The logic is deliberately sequenced. Segmentation narrows the field; understanding tells you what is happening with buyers and trade partners; reach decides how the product arrives; execution makes it repeatable. Skip one step and the others start carrying weight they were not designed for.

The real problem is usually upstream

The book’s sharper claim is psychological. Ramachandran says teams often work “harder and harder to solve growth problems” without first asking whether they are solving the right problem. A fall in sales productivity or a distribution gap, he says, is “a symptom.” The real job is to find the cause and change the thing that needs changing.

For our readers, that is the useful reframe. A brand that responds to a gap by simply adding distributors or discounting harder is treating the symptom. A brand that walks the SURE sequence stops to ask whether the segment is wrong, whether channel behaviour has shifted, or whether execution has become inconsistent at the last mile.

What to do with the SURE lens

The playbook matters because the ₹100–400 crore band is where founder intuition meets operational complexity. Early growth often comes from being fast and close to the market. At scale, the number of markets, SKUs and trade partners multiplies, and the same founder-led calls can create bottlenecks instead of breakthroughs.

For marketing teams, the framework doubles as a diagnostic order. A campaign can be sharp and still fail if the segment is fuzzy or the route to market is weak. The SURE sequence pushes marketers to see brand strategy and distribution as one system, not separate silos.

There are three practical takeaways. First, before adding spending or feet on street, define the problem as a causal chain rather than a sales number. Second, use the SURE sequence as a diagnostic: if reach looks broken, check whether the segment was prioritised clearly and whether the channel was truly understood. Third, treat execution as a design problem, not a motivation problem — systems and checks beat exhortation once the business crosses a certain size.

The book is available through Amazon, Flipkart, Play Store, Apple and Barnes & Noble.

Source: Afaqs!