Sales Planning Starts with Product Profile Detailing

If you are using a consultative approach to selling, you will need to put in a lot of work to equip yourself with the right approach, right information and do the ground work about your product as well as about your customer and his line of business.

You would need to gather and study all details of your product and your business so that you are very well conversant with your product or service. You might wonder as to why we are emphasizing this point. Isn’t it true that all salesmen will know their product?. Well, we are talking about getting to know your product and your business in greater detail and doing your homework well.

For example, if you are a salesman selling supply chain and logistics products and services, you will have multiple products such as Air and Ground freight, warehousing, Inventory management, transportation and many more complimentary products that form the part of total supply chain solution. Take the case of warehousing services.

Every industry, be it automotive, retail or fashion, every industry requires warehousing services. Furthermore, warehousing services are used in raw material warehousing and spare parts as well as finished goods warehousing.

Though the product and the core processes remain the same, different industries will have specific requirement whereby the solution needs to be customized.

The racking systems, the infrastructure and the processes used for an automotive plant is totally different from that of a retail distribution system. On the other hand spare parts warehousing calls for a totally different set of solution design.

Product Profile Detailing

Elaborating further, each customer depending upon the size of business operations and other considerations, will need the warehousing product to be designed specifically for his purpose. A parts service distribution center network for Dell, IBM or parts distribution for Xerox would be totally different from that of a finished goods distribution center for the same companies.

Therefore as a part of sales planning, it helps to do a detailed profile of the product that you are selling. In the case of warehousing, you would need to do a lot of detailing to first describe the product and its basic features. Then it helps to identify all potential industries that would need warehousing services.

Here you will find that all industries that manufacture and sell products would require warehousing services at multiple points of their business chain. In such a situation, you might want to make a list of those industries that you would want to identify and focus on. You might not want to attempt an earth moving equipment industry or aviation sector etc. You might want to target only a few of the industries like high tech, medical, fashion and retail etc.

Therefore working in detail helps you get clarity on where your focus should lie. Apart from having to eliminate certain industries, there might be other considerations like financial exposure limits or the size of operations that could be a qualifying factor that you might need to build into your prospecting list.

There is a lot more that you can do in detailing your product and its possible uses in various industries. The more you spend time in this area, the better salesman you will be. You would then be able to easily lead your prospective customer to the best solution and sell better than others.


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