How Salespeople Expand Customers’ Product Portfolios

The following is a typical scene of a non-alcoholic beverage seller: he approaches a neighborhood store with a huge, unwieldy notebook where photos and details of all the products offered by the company are kept.

When he arrives, the storekeeper is very busy serving his customers, which, in addition, due to health restrictions, he does them from a prudent distance and with a fence in between.

Between one customer and another, and with time against him – each daily route includes a number of stores to visit – he begins to offer the different product options in their different packaging and flavors: sugar-free, grapefruit flavor, orange flavor, in cans, in 750 ml bottles, disposable 1.5 liter, 2.5 liter, etc. Among them is the new coffee flavor, a product that the company is seeking to promote.

The seller juggles the notebook to show all the product options, until the storekeeper finally tells him: «Excuse me, I don’t have much time, I ask you for the usual, the classic. Another day we’ll see new products.»

What this scene demonstrates is the great number of obstacles that the sales force faces today when it has to go out and offer the product portfolio to the traditional channel. They must sell a large number of SKUs to a broad portfolio of clients, but they do not have the necessary tools to show the enormous variety of products that the company has.

New technologies provide a solution to these inconveniences and have recently become a very valuable tool for extending the product portfolio and decision-making.

The traditional product portfolio: short and inefficient

In marketing, the portfolio is known as the entire range of products that a company has to offer to its entire audience, without distinctions. Within the portfolio there are groups and categories, according to the different variables established by the company itself.

The portfolio has certain basic features: breadth of product lines that are marketed, depth of variants of each product, total extension of the company’s products, and consistency between each product line and its final marketing.

What is currently happening in the traditional channel is that the sales force does not have the possibility of offering the product portfolio in a complete way. Out of 500 SKUs, for example, they may only have the time and space to offer 50 – and it is still a lot – of which the storekeeper remains with only the 30 he already knows. So there are another 470 products that could not be sold. It is likely that not all of those 470 products are intended for that type of store, but perhaps there are 150 or 200 that fit perfectly.

In this outdated model, the seller is barely an order taker. Many sales opportunities are lost; they cannot make recommendations or advice that will be beneficial for the company and the store.

How to expand the product portfolio through technology?

Times are changing and the incorporation of new technological systems such as artificial intelligence and machine learning have the potential to improve the efficiency of mass sales strategies in the traditional channel.

Let’s start with a simple technology that many companies use today: a mobile app that allows visualizing the entire product portfolio with an easy interface and a friendly design for anyone.

With that app, the sales force and the storekeeper can establish a more fluid communication, see images, know details of all products and place orders online in just a few seconds, just with the movement of their fingers on the smartphone screen.

But technology can help even more. If that mobile app is added to a data collection, cross-referencing and analysis system, more efficient sales can be carried out. We are talking about an artificial intelligence system. The app not only displays the products and offers the possibility of placing orders online, but also begins to recognize sales patterns in all its users.

Personalized sales force recommendations

In this way, the sales force begins to have a precise tool to provide personalized advice. When the seller now communicates with the storekeeper, he will be able to guide him better: «Look, in addition to the flavors and containers you always ask me for, I recommend that you try these other flavors that the data indicates have sold really well in stores very similar to yours.»

The next step is the appearance of intelligent recommendations: by recognizing sales patterns and with the different variables of each customer, the system itself will be able to make automatic predictions and suggestions in the next orders.

That is, the intelligent recommendation will suggest, based on concrete and precise data, which products are worth taking, in what quantity and with what frequency. Also, being a machine learning technology, the more it is used, the more precise its result will be, since it is designed to «learn» from the experience of users.

New times for the sales force

What is shown is that technology is transforming the sales experience of the traditional channel. Those days of informality, estimated calculations and little variety of products are now a thing of the past, opening a new path where sellers have modern tools to extend the product portfolio and generate more sales.