An important part of operating any business is making sure you are providing the products and services your customers – and potential customers – need and want. While this may seem obvious, there is a lot of potential sitting out there that companies are not taking advantage of because they aren't continually reviewing what their customers really need.

Your goal should be to establish a full package of goods and services that meet or exceed your customers' expectations, while at the same time making sure you aren't stocking the wrong things.

Once you have defined your product package, you should be able to classify the products by how they benefit your sales goals. Breaking them into three tiers is an effective way to identify the role each product will play in your overall strategy and how you should approach selling them:

First are the main lines. These are the products that generate – or could generate – significant sales and profit you directly. High-demand items that offer a large profit margin would fall into this category.

Second are the door openers or problem solvers. These products will likely never have large profit potential but are items that your customers need – and want to get in the easiest way possible. These products help highlight the ways in which your company can meet the broader needs of a customer.

Finally, tertiary lines. Sometimes the products and services you offer really don't have large potential for most accounts, nor are they good door openers, but they may round out your product offering in a way that helps you exceed those customer expectations mentioned above.

The third group is not to be sold, but to be made available as a service to the customers, because they all use some of it. Promote these products with resources other than face-to-face selling, such as emails or other promotional materials.

What Do Salesmen Need to Know?
Once the products are chosen and ranked, the real work will begin, and the quality process should start to take effect. If you now know the primary and secondary lines that will allow your company to achieve its sales goals, it would make sense that all your salespeople need to know as much as possible about these lines.

If you were a customer, what things would you want a salesman to know about the products he is selling to you? And if you were a manufacturer what would you expect a distributor salesman to know about your products?

Your sales team doesn't need to have the same level of knowledge as a product engineer, but they should be able to effectively answer key questions about the items they're selling.

Rusty Duncan is the founder and Chief Markets Analyst for Industrial Market Information. For more information on the product line analysis IMI can provide, please contact IMI or complete an information request form.