In my career I have witnessed products labeled as ‘dead’ become our best sellers… Saved from discontinuation through re-positioning.
When starting at a new job many years ago, I was informed that none of our B2B customers were purchasing one of our products and that it had been sitting in our warehouse for a long time so I needed to sell the stock, and I could apply a healthy discount to clear it.
Hoping to clear some units we added it to our website at a clearance price. Unexpectedly we started selling it better than anticipated and received product reviews that were quite informative. We got curious, and after speaking to a couple of the customers we discovered we had a positioning issue. Where we had positioned the item, was not targeted to the right consumer so they didn’t see value in it, and we didn’t understand well enough the benefit of the product to our purchasing customers until they enlightened us.
After re-working the positioning and description on our website, and adapting our storytelling of our sales reps to our B2B customers we were able to restore retail price and see sales continue to grow. What is interesting, is that this occurrence with the same product was also experienced in our other markets Europe and the USA, where it became one of our B2C bestsellers. The feedback and the consumer profile matched what we had seen in Australia. This doesn’t always happen across international markets, but this one transcended and hence has been a quite memorable learning experience during my career.
Where we think our product fits and appeals to from inside a business, can be different to the perspective of customers & the market. Incorrect positioning of a product or service can be the reason for poor results, and can also be the gap that needs to be bridged for better sales.
If you have a product or service that isn’t selling as expected, get curious, talk to customers and accounts, check reviews and feedback, talk to your sales and customer service teams to understand if you have a positioning problem.
Use this information to adapt your storytelling, and it could transform no sales to sales pretty quickly!
Comments