Your Growth Plan Isn’t Failing Because of Strategy. It’s Failing Because of People.

Every CPG board we speak to has a growth plan. It's often a very good plan. Probably (re)written by McKinsey. And yet, far too often, execution stalls - not because the strategy was wrong, but because the business didn’t have the right people in the right roles to deliver it.

This is the CPG capability gap.

And in 2026, it’s the single biggest constraint on commercial growth across the industry.

The Gap Nobody Wants to Talk About

Most CPG businesses are running commercial growth plans with commercial teams that were built for a different era. The team that got you to £50M may not be the team that gets you to £150M. The commercial structure that worked when you had three key accounts and one channel doesn’t scale when you’re managing fifteen retailers, a D2C business, an international expansion and a margin reset simultaneously.

This isn’t a criticism of the people involved. It’s an observation about how quickly the commercial landscape has changed and how slowly most organisations adapt their capability to match.

The businesses feeling this most acutely are the ones at an inflection point - PE-backed brands post-investment that need to professionalise their commercial function, founder-led businesses hitting complexity they’ve never managed before and established players restructuring their operating model to protect profitability.

In every case, the constraint is the same: they need people who can operate at the intersection of data, commercial judgement, and cross-functional influence. And there aren’t enough of them.

Why Traditional Hiring Doesn’t Solve This

When a CPG business recognises a capability gap, the instinct is to hire. That’s the right instinct. But the way most businesses hire for these roles creates its own problems.

The typical approach: write a job description, hand it to a generalist recruiter, interview a shortlist of people who look good on paper, pick the one who interviews best. Six to twelve months later, assess whether it worked.

The problem with this approach is that it optimises for availability rather than fit. Generalist recruiters don’t understand the nuance of commercial CPG roles. They can’t assess whether a candidate who’s “done RGM at Nestlé” has actually built and owned a pricing strategy or simply contributed to a team of twenty doing it. They can’t evaluate whether someone’s “commercial strategy experience” means they’ve genuinely shaped where-to-play/how-to-win decisions or just populated the slides.

The result is hires that look right on LinkedIn but don’t deliver in practice. And the capability gap persists.

What the Smartest CPG Businesses Are Doing Differently

The businesses that are actually closing their capability gaps share three characteristics:

They define the problem before the role.

Instead of starting with a job title, they start with a question: what commercial capability do we lack, and what’s the cost of that gap? This changes everything about how the role is scoped, how candidates are assessed and what success looks like.

A business that says “we need a Head of RGM” will hire differently from one that says “we’re losing 3 points of margin because we can’t defend our pricing in retailer negotiations, and we need someone who can build the commercial framework, the data infrastructure, and the cross-functional alignment to fix that.” Both might end up with the same job title. Only one will end up with the right person.

They hire for trajectory, not just pedigree. 

The best capability hires aren’t always the candidates with the most prestigious CV. They’re the ones whose career arc shows a pattern of building, fixing or transforming - often in environments that are messy, fast-moving and under-resourced. These are the people who thrive in inflection-point businesses.

They use specialist recruitment partners who can challenge their thinking.

Not order-takers who present a longlist and hope for the best, but partners who understand the commercial CPG landscape deeply enough to push back on a brief that’s too narrow, too generic or solving the wrong problem.

The Candidate Perspective: How to Position Yourself as a Capability Hire

If you’re a commercial CPG professional, understanding the capability gap creates a significant career advantage. The businesses with the most interesting opportunities - the ones offering real scope, influence and progression - are the ones trying to close a specific capability gap. They’re not hiring to maintain the status quo. They’re hiring to change it.

To position yourself for these roles, think about your career in terms of the capabilities you’ve built, not just the roles you’ve held.

What can the business do now that it couldn’t do before you arrived?

What decisions are being made differently because of your work?

What’s the commercial impact in concrete terms?

“I understand the problem you’re trying to solve, and here’s evidence that I’ve solved something similar.” That’s a fundamentally different proposition from “here’s my CV, I’ve got ten years of experience.”

The candidates who win these mandates are the ones who can walk into a conversation and say: “I understand the problem you’re trying to solve, and here’s evidence that I’ve solved something similar.” That’s a fundamentally different proposition from “here’s my CV, I’ve got ten years of experience.”

Where POET Fits In This Picture

POET was built specifically for this - recruiting the people who unlock growth in CPG businesses at an inflection point.

We specialise in six commercial functions that sit at the heart of the capability gap: Revenue Growth Management, Commercial Strategy, Sales Operations, Commercial Finance, MS&P and Commercial Excellence.

We don’t do volume hiring. We partner with CPG leaders to understand the real commercial problem they’re solving, then find the people who can actually solve it. Our shortlists are assessed against business challenges, not just CV fit.

And, with two decades of networks across global brands, PE-backed scale-ups and founder-led businesses, we reach the passive talent that generalist recruiters simply don’t.

If you’re a CPG leader who knows your growth plan needs better capability behind it - or a commercial professional looking for a role where you can make a genuine impact - let’s talk.

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POET is a specialist CPG recruitment partner focused on commercial growth and transformation roles. We help consumer goods businesses hire exceptional talent across Revenue Growth Management, Commercial Strategy, Sales Operations, Commercial Finance, MS&P and Commercial Excellence.