Head of Offline Sales (Agrochemicals)

Role summary

Own the entire offline revenue engine for the agrochemical business. This is a build-from-zero mandate, not a maintenance role. You will design the territory map, hire and run the field team, expand the franchise network, and make sure existing franchise partners actually make money and reorder.

The person we are looking for learned the trade inside a large, established crop-protection or fertiliser company, and then went on to build a business from a small base into a large one. We want both halves of that career.

Key responsibilities

1. Build the offline sales organisation

• Design the state, zone and territory structure from scratch, with beat plans, coverage norms and headcount-per-territory logic
• Hire, onboard and train Regional Managers, ASMs and field officers; build a layer of managers who can run zones without you
• Set annual budgets, sales forecasts, targets and incentive structures
• Install the reporting discipline: DSR, beat adherence, productive call ratio, secondary sales visibility, monthly MIS to the board

2. Franchise network expansion

• Own the franchise funnel end to end: lead sourcing, partner qualification, catchment evaluation, commercial negotiation, agreement, store opening
• Set the qualification bar for a partner (investment capacity, local standing, agri background, catchment size)
• Hit an agreed opening run rate per quarter, state by state
• Build the opening playbook: layout, opening stock mix, launch activity, local farmer outreach

3. Repeat business and partner profitability

• Own reorder rate, order frequency and revenue per franchise, not just the count of openings
• Run structured partner health reviews: stock movement, dead inventory, farmer footfall, partner ROI
• Build the support layer that makes a store profitable: product training, agronomy support, demand generation, farmer meets, demo plots
• Diagnose and fix underperforming stores before they close; own churn as a number

4. Supply coordination with our factory

• Translate the field forecast into a monthly and seasonal production plan and share it with the plant with enough lead time
• Coordinate with manufacturing, packaging and dispatch so channel and franchise orders ship complete and on time, especially in peak season
• Own fill rate, order-to-delivery time and stock availability at the partner end
• Flag SKU-level demand shifts early so the plant does not produce what the field cannot sell

5. Portfolio and margin

• Work with the product team on the offline portfolio mix, pack sizes and pricing
• Own the channel P&L: pricing, trade schemes, liquidation and market returns
• Run the channel on cash and advance payment terms, with no credit extended to partners

Requirements

• 18 to 25 years in agri-inputs (agrochemicals, fertilisers, bio-inputs, seeds), the entire career in this industry
• The first half of the career spent at a large established crop-protection or fertiliser company, in field and regional roles, learning territory management, demo and farmer development work, and distributor handling from the ground up
• The second half spent scaling a business from a small base, ideally at a growth-stage or agri-tech company, with a revenue number you can point to and defend
• Direct, personal record of appointing distributors and opening retail outlets at scale, not managing an inherited network
• Has led a zone across at least 4 or 5 states, with Regional Managers reporting into you and a field team of 75 or more
• Able to build and hold a channel on cash and advance terms in a market where competitors offer credit
• Comfortable working closely with a manufacturing plant on forecasting, production planning and dispatch
• B.Sc Agriculture plus M.Sc Agriculture required; a management degree or executive programme strongly preferred
• Comfortable owning a P&L, unit economics, budgeting and forecasting, not just a top-line target
• Fluent in Hindi; a second regional language is a strong plus
• Willing to be on the road most of the month

Strongly preferred

• Experience with a franchise, exclusive-outlet or Krishi Kendra style retail format
• Has worked in a manufacturer-owned channel, or built own-label lines, and understands the margin logic behind them
• Has built the reporting and MIS layer for a sales team, not just used one built by others
• Central or Western India base (MP, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan) with an existing network there
• Blended online and offline channel experience, given our digital base