Killing Off a Product Line - Global Sales Mentor | Zach Selch

Crossing the Nile on a little boat driven apparently by teenagers, and this is a traditional way. It's a little wooden boat. There aren't necessarily bridges everywhere on the Nile. I'm going from the east side to the west side, and according to Egyptian mythology, the east was the side of life and the west was the side of death. The west was where the necropolises were and where they had the large burial places places and that kind of thing. And the east was where the various temples were and where typically people farmed, etc., and lived and so on. I find that periodically we have to kill off product lines. If you're in business long enough, I've been doing business for about 30 years, eventually you're going to kill off a few product lines. And I've done that myself probably 5 to 7 times. Sometimes you're with a company that has 1 or 2 products And those products last for a long time. Sometimes we're with a company that has 50 or 100 products, and when that happens, you're killing off products all the time. It's never fun to kill off a product unless you really hate that product for some reason. But you can utilize it from a sales and marketing perspective sometimes to really leverage on your reputation and gain some reputation, gain some impact. On the market. And of course, I'm speaking from a purely sales and marketing perspective now, and not necessarily from a perspective of— not necessarily from an operational perspective. I typically don't like to refer to things in ways I don't know. There are a lot of operational issues, logistical issues, manufacturing issues that relate to killing off a product line. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about purely from a sales and marketing perspective. In the last company I worked for, we had just a few products. We only had about 3 product lines, and those products were extremely robust. They would last, once you installed them, customers would use them for 15 or 20 years. The product lines lived for 10 to 12 years. And we actually killed off a product when I first started with the company, and we continued to service it for about 15 years, which was pretty amazing. We gave a 2-year notice when we terminated of the product. We told people that we would sell them spare parts for 7 years, but no new systems. And we actually ended up selling spare parts for about 15 years before we stopped doing that. And that was a fantastic tool. Because we were a bigger company, an older company, sometimes our competitors would say to customers, you know, their product is a little old, it's not the newest, what are you going to do if they should kill off the product? And we had a great answer. We could say, look, if you take a look at this product, We actually serviced it for 15 years after we killed it off. So you can trust that you're always going to be able to get spare parts. And we could even give references to attest to that. So that worked out really well. On the other hand, I've worked for companies where we've done it very poorly, where really we've gotten bad press and bad customer perception from the way we've killed off products. So the way you go about killing off a product can really make or break your reputation. in a lot of ways. At a minimum, I would say you want to give people 18 months to 24 months notice before you kill off a product line. And sometimes you can also explain how— why you're going about doing it, why the product line is being phased out. You can explain that you're replacing it with something else, or in the best-case scenario, you replace it with something else, and then once you've replaced it, you then come out and say, and now, of course, we're going to phase out this line. The other thing is I like to be able to say, to tell people how long they're going to be able to get spare parts. So if I can say to them, we commit to 7 years' supply of spare parts, and very often when you're dealing with governments, when you're dealing with a lot of tenders and that kind of thing, 7 years is the length of time people expect from you no matter what. So if you can say here, I'm going to give you 7 years, I'm going to supply spare parts for 7 years, I'm going to give you 2 years to make your last order, really that's a very very fair way about— of going about doing it. And then once you've done it that way, you can really use that to enhance your reputation as a company that really services the market and treats people fairly. Remember, when you're ready to grow your international sales, reach out to us. We can help. When you decide it's time to grow your international sales, call us.