How many direct cover is enough?
The answer is probably never enough 
. When talking about distribution and availability, the issue how many are directly 
and indirectly covered by manufacturer is always comes up. This become a sticky point between sales and marketing department when they are meeting on the same table.
The problem is it is not a black and white situation. To be fair, with millions of retail store in Indonesia, we can not expect sales people or our distributor to directly cover all of the retailers. But they should cover the important one.
A decent FMCG distributor should have about 150 thousand or more retailers under their direct cover plan. Usually those are big retailer, wholesaler or semi wholesaler. This is the minimum level of distribution you will expect from a good FMCG distributor (More if you are cigarette company).
However distributing alone is not enough to make to product to “trickled down” to the smaller retailer. These “big” retailer need to be encouraged to “moved” the product to the smaller retailer. This is when marketing department play a very important role. They should advertised the product to create the consumer demand, or give a trade promo to encourage a smaller retailer to carry the product.
But it is difficult to verify the number of retailer directly covered by distributor, even if they part of the organization. I encourage the marketing team to go often to the market to check the availability from time to time.
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