Are you selling the right things?

How to tell if your products are holding your business back and what to do about it.

Effective marketing is built on two things: selling the right products to the right people. Get one of these elements wrong and no matter how creative and engaging your marketing communications are, your marketing won’t work. And when your marketing doesn’t work, your business doesn’t make the money it needs.

Marketing to the wrong people means you are marketing to the wrong segment or to a very poorly defined segment (learn more about customer segmentation and how to do it properly).

Too often, small and growing businesses get their ‘Product Mix’ wrong. Your Product Mix is ALL the products or services you offer. (Note: I am going to use the word ‘products’ from now on to mean ‘products or services’.) 

So, here’s how you can tell if your products are holding your business back – and what you can do about it.

Too many products

Test: Can you easily list all the products you sell? If you sell a lot of products, can you easily list the product categories?

If you can’t quickly and easily say what you sell, why would you expect your prospective customers (prospects) to wade through your marketing, trying to figure out what you offer? 

Your product offerings should be easy to understand, recall and explain. And, if you sell a lot of products, then you need to have them in clear product categories.

When you have too many products, you’re like one of those restaurants that present customers with a multi-page table menu. It takes forever to make a choice! You sit there, flicking through it, trying to figure out what you’re in the mood for, what will taste nice, perhaps worrying about making the right choice. It also screams ‘low quality’ as how can one kitchen produce all of those things to a high standard?

Too much choice:

• slows down the buying decision – sometimes to the point where your prospective customer just moves on
• says you aren’t experts  – think ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’; it’s the opposite of a Known Expert Strategy.

If you have too many products, read on. The next few points could help you decide which to cull.

Not wanted or needed products

If you have products that aren’t selling or gaining traction, before you invest more in your marketing budget, first be very sure that they are wanted or needed by your marketplace. 

Every product you offer should clearly solve a problem and meet a want or need for your key audience. If your product doesn’t do this and doesn’t drive demand, chances are you won’t make any sales. 

Before you ditch this product, do some market research to see if you are missing out on opportunities that your product could be good for if you tweak it. 

Not profitable or a clear stepping stone to profit products

If a product isn’t making a healthy profit, then you may question why you’re offering it. The only reason to keep it is if it’s a ‘stepping stone’ on your product pathway. 

This means that as part of your marketing strategy, you deliberately offer a series of products that start at ‘Free Taster’, move to ‘Low Cost/Low Risk’ to get you through the door, and then, once it happens, sell a high-profit product. 

If a product isn’t profitable in its own right or a clear stepping stone to a more profitable product, ditch it.

It’s a ‘legacy’ product

This happens. Businesses offer products they no longer sell. It’s VERY typical in growing businesses where you have legacy customers, who you’ve been selling a certain product or service to for ages, and you don’t want to cut them loose, but… you no longer sell that product to anyone else.

You can keep your Legacy Products ticking over as long as they are easy to service and you’re making a profit. 

We always advise that you let those clients know they are special as a result of your long-standing relationship. If selling a legacy product damages your business in any way, e.g. other clients want to know why they can’t have that product, then it’s time to retire that legacy product. 

You no longer sell it

This happens too. You used to sell this product, but you don’t anymore and you haven’t removed it from your website and other marketing. Your reasons might be:

• You forgot it was there
• You think it makes you look bigger / better to show that you offer it
• You’re emotionally attached to it

Get rid of it. If having provided that service is part of your Known Expert Strategy, then talk about how you have done it but don’t offer it. 

As a Strategic Marketer who came up through the ranks, I can do many different aspects of marketing at the Marketing Manager level – but I don’t. Instead, I let people know how I have done it and how experienced I am, which gives me more credibility when advising them on marketing strategy. 

Final thought

If the idea of ditching any of your products worries you and you think it could adversely affect your business, then trial it. Hide them on your website, stop talking about them in your marketing, and see how your business fares for at least three months. 

My prediction is that by pruning your Product Mix so you have a few relevant, highly profitable and sought-after products, your marketing will be:

• more focused and easier to do because you have fewer products to talk about
• more effective because it is easier for people to figure out if you offer what they want / need
• more profitable because all this should translate to better and more sales.