Do you have the luxury of good records on your sales? Then you may find some of your products have gone up in sales volume and others have gone down. A product range review might allow some quick improvements. This has the added advantage of being a longer lasting improvement as well.
1. Sales Volume Gone Down:
Give this some quick attention in case there is something that you can rectify and get an increase in value from these items.
2. Sales Volume Increased:
Capitalise by producing more of that product for sale.
It is a fundamental law that the products you run out of first are the ones that are the best sellers; something that is not selling sits on the shelves.
If you are not replacing your best-selling lines as quickly as possible, you are foregoing sales.
The amount that you are missing out on can be substantial.
For more on this, read the article: Cost of Over and Under Stocking
3. Change your product line to introduce products that are more attractive. In the very short term, you could do this by selling those products on behalf of another party.
4. A little bit of comparison shopping with your competitors may indicate products that they are selling and you are not.
With this knowledge, add additional products to your range.
5. If you produce your own products, try buying wholesale and reselling, at retail, a competitor’s product. This will allow you to see if you get extra sales without all the problems of inventory and manufacturing. See whether selling that product is going to work for you. If it does, start to produce your own version of that product, later on, rather than selling it on behalf of another. Investigate the Intellectual Property attached to these products.
6. You may have products in your range that sell very little. You can reduce complexity by quickly removing the worse performers. Not stocking them also frees up cash to buy better selling products. Remember, it is very likely that as much as 80% of your sales comes from 20% of your products (see this link).
For more help understanding any issues relating to this Section of the Turnaround90 Campaign, use the 12Faces Diagnostic System to drill down to root causes of problems and find our suggested Treatments.