Up to this point, we have focused on the people in your sales strategy. But at least as important as the buyers and sellers of your products to your overall sales success are the products themselves. Understanding product performance through sales reporting is essential
How your products are performing, as revealed by your sales reporting, will not only inform ongoing sales strategy but product development, distribution and the messaging of your marketing campaigns. Sales reporting can be telling you which products are selling and which are not, how sales for each product are trending and how your products can be better positioned.
There are seven things your sales data could be telling you. How various products are performing across your channels says a lot about your product mix and your relevance to the market. The product behavior sales reporting can reveal, seen in the light of recent events, economic trends and competitor activity indicates needed market pivots, sales outreach or development of new products
How are your products performing?
For your sales reporting to give you valuable intelligence about product performance, you need to understand patterns in the output. There are many reasons why advisors will invest into and redeem out of various products.
- Competitor Offerings
- Market Conditions
- Recent Performance
- Market Relevance
If your sales reporting is giving you true intelligence it will tell you what you need to do to attract advisors to your products and reduce the risk of redemptions. If performance is an issue of perception, refined marketing may be in order. If your sales reporting shows that market conditions have had an outsized effect, a new product offering may be indicated.
Monitoring the performance of your product suite with an eye on the various factors that may affect it gives you the tools to remain competitive in a crowded space for investment products. A comprehensive ongoing sales reporting process gives you insight into the life of each product so you can respond to changes nimbly.
This graph shows the product along with reviewing assets for the last 4 years. This can be used to compare campaigns that have run to see what worked and what didn’t.
Sales reporting isn’t only about sales but about products. Advisors are responding to many influences in making their sales decisions. Whether those influences are a matter of perception, demand or competitive pressure is discernable in sales reporting that approaches the data from multiple angles. Sales reporting that analyzes history, trends and activity versus sales generally, by firm or by advisor can give you the insight you need to achieve a true competitive advantage.
In Part 7 we will look at how it all comes together: “What does my long-term strategy look like?”
