The company is a B2B manufacturer with thousands of individual SKUs. Each product was referenced by its model number and only very experienced stakeholders understood the jargon. Perhaps no one knew all the products the company offered.
Certainly, the internal sales teams and the channel could not articulate the purpose or vision of the product portfolio, the guiding principles for the product roadmap, or how each product fit into the portfolio or related to each other. Stakeholders were unfocused, misaligned, and paralyzed with too many options.
Management theorized that the complexity left huge gaps of product knowledge, missed cross-selling opportunities, and had an overall chilling effect on the sales cycle.
I proposed a three-step approach: 1) Review the overall product portfolio and create a simple, functional framework that captured and organized the core offerings. 2) Rationalize each product within the new framework. 3) Prioritize products based on current sales, sales forecasts, or necessity.
To start developing the high-level framework or portfolio architecture, we needed to establish agreement and discipline regarding terminology (as not everything is an ecosystem, platform, or solution and these words are not interchangeable). Next, we needed to identify and agree upon priority levels (as every product cannot be the same high priority and consume the same sales and marketing resources).
We established that the company name should command the highest level of messaging and that other “brands,” product “series” or “families” would either get phased out or take secondary or supporting roles. The company name or brand would represent the “ecosystem.”
The ecosystem would consist of four strategic “platforms.” Each platform would consist of “solution sets,” which would comprise the “product categories,” and finally, the individual product model numbers. This framework provided a hierarchy through which appropriate marketing messaging could be developed. Asset types, such as blogs, infographics, videos, webinars, white papers, and application diagrams with targeted messaging were then aligned to each stage of the customer journey.
Product categories that were necessary, but not strategic would remain in the portfolio, but would not be actively promoted or marketed (rather sold as implementation devices during the system specification or design stage). Products that were neither necessary nor strategic would be phased out.
For the first time, a vision, understanding, and consensus was reached regarding the purpose and benefits of the company’s product catalog. Organizing and structuring thousands of individual SKUs into smaller meaningful, memorable, and repeatable groupings provided clarity and focus for strategic marketing and product development decisions, and for tactical sales activities.
Customers were motivated and guided through the sales funnel more efficiently and the conversion rate of lead to sale increased. Incremental sales grew by nearly 20%.
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