Question: Has your Sales Organisation formally defined which are your highest priority products – and do your sales executives offer those products to customers and prospects to achieve the business’s revenue goals?
This sounds like such a simple question – even an obvious one, but take a moment to ask (and answer) this critical question: Do you know with absolute certainty what your sales executives are selling?
More importantly, are they selling the right things? These include products with the highest margins, as well as solutions that will result in repeat business and higher-volume sales. If your answer is that you don’t know – or that you’re unsure, the reality is that your sales teams could be selling anything.
The Reality
According to our research at ThinkSales Global, only 57.8% of Sales Organisations have formally identified which of their offerings are their highest priority products.
In addition, 46.6% of companies rate their confidence as Outstanding that their Sales Managers are disciplined and consistent in monitoring and interrogating whether their sales executives focus on selling those products.
The ‘High-Priority Products’ Problem
Which are the most profitable products in your company’s catalogue? Which products should you focus on to meet your key objectives? Which other verticals or industries could benefit from your solutions? Your company may have reached its market cap in one area, and in order to grow, it might make sense to move into a new market.
Moving into new markets could require a product shift, adding a product to your product line, or simply researching and recognising other industries that could benefit from what you have to offer. It might also be as simple as your sales force focusing on selling a different product or service that already exists, but hasn’t been their core focus until this point.
Unless you have defined this and set up target activities for your sales executives against which sales managers can measure progress, your sales teams will tend to default back to the easiest sell, or to the products they feel most comfortable selling. The problem is that those might not be the right products for your business’s growth objectives.
Ensure your sales team is selling the right products
To determine whether your sales executives are selling the right products, you need to be tracking these metrics:
- Revenue by product
- Percentage of revenue from target products
- Number of unique products sold per rep
- Cross-sell rate
- Gross profit per product
- Gross profit margin per product
Based on this information, you can determine which products should be prioritised, as well as the sales processes that will support the relevant deal flows.
Before you can design sales processes and a product focus to match each specific sales role however, you need to determine what those various roles are. In the case of Product Focus, these are the typical groupings:
- High vs low-tech products
- Stand-alone vs bundled products
- Off-the-shelf vs customised / tailored options
- Entry-level vs advanced use
Groupings like the examples above will help you determine which sales executives are best suited to which products, and where additional training and coaching is needed.
NOTE: By providing your sales force with the right guidance, you can focus on high-profit products to boost your top-line revenue and grow your bottom line.
Do This:
The value of a sales process that is linked to specific product focus and sales roles is that it can be measured and managed based on key metrics.
Metrics: Product Focus
These activities can be measured and managed:
- Number of specific customer product calls
- Number of different products sold to each customer
- Number of total product availability sold per rep
- Number of proposals presented per product
- % of targeted new customers per product
Assess the health of your sales organisation
Identifying high-priority products and then monitoring whether sales executives are focusing on these products are two of 322 measures of a world-class Sales Organisation.
ThinkSales Global is a specialist revenue engineering consultancy.
We assist our clients to deliver market-defying results through strategic and tactical intentions within a Sales Organisation Maturity Model that addresses the five key pillars of high-performing Sales Organsations, namely:
- Competitive Strategy
- Customer Engagement
- Sales Talent
- Sales Management
- Sales Enablement
How does your Sales Organisation stack up? Find out by taking the ThinkSales 5 Pillar Strategic Sales Assessment™.
This first-of-its-kind 360-degree gap analysis report enables your Sales Leadership team to assess its strengths and detect weaknesses and impediments to revenue growth across the five pillars.
Click here for more information on the ThinkSales 5 Pillar Strategic Sales Assessment™.
