One of the first things that sales and company executives ask us when we meet them is; “We need to grow our sales, what can you do for us?” To that we always respond, “If you’d share with us some of the processes that you have in place now for the sales team to follow – we can then take a look at them and see if there might be a way that we can help.”

What we’ve found is that most of the time the issue is always the same: There simply isn’t a process in place for us to look at – period. The salespeople almost always seem to be autonomous from the rest of the company. There are well thought out processes in place for finance, personnel and administration – but not for sales. When we ask the question of why the building of a business development process for the salespeople seemed to be pushed to the wayside, we almost always got the same response:

“It’s a huge undertaking and I know I should (Don’t you just love that word should?) be doing something – but where would I start?”

A long time ago, a successful business development professional told me that its far easier to sell more to the people already being sold to than go out and try and close new business. It seemed to me pretty obvious and, since I was also a reseller at the time, I developed a suggestive selling program to encourage my line staff to adopt the practice. It was a successful effort as my company grew 25 percent that year — at least 60 percent of which can be directly attributed to the program.

Sound interesting? It should. Unfortunately the percentage of resellers who train their staff to “suggestive sell” is far less than you’d expect based on the opportunity it presents. I’ve heard estimates that anywhere from 20-25 percent of resellers suggestive sell. What about the other 75-80 percent? They take orders…and their growth and profitability is negatively impacted as a result.

There is a trick to being successful and making sure that your retail margins are high enough to cover your “nut” (the cost of opening your doors) while leaving enough on the bottom line to reward you for your investment and for your efforts to build your business.

That trick is called MATRIX PRICING. Matrix pricing divides up products into categories based on their level of demand, the gross margin that is possible to get based on the first factor (together with competition) and the percentage of the total business that particular product has compared with all the others in the retail store.

Who uses Matrix Pricing? Just about every grocery store chain, most retail & franchise chains, the big-box stores (WalMart, Target, Lowes, Home Depot, hardware store chains (franchise, coops and independent chains), etc. The list goes on and on. Many people who work in these stores are not aware of how pricing is done.