It's important that you know your products and services inside out. Each product you sell should have a product information file. There may be a production version, marketing version and a sales version depending on your business, but there must be one! Marketeers need to be able to track products and their changes. If your industry is regulated, for example cosmetics then you wil already have one in place. However, you may need to set up your own marketing product file to help you with your marketing.

Review the Product Information File Template in the resources file to give you a head start on designing your own.

You must also make sure that you know your competitors products just as well. This will help you to develop a competitive edge. Ask yourself, are yours better, more reliable, more advanced? Benchmark your company using a specific product matrix taken from the competitor grid. On-line comparison sites do just this everyday for their customers!

Some other questions you might want to consider are:

• Do you have too many products which leads to mountains of obsolete stock?
• Do you have too few products in your range? Does this discourage retailers and distributors from stocking your products?
• Which products make money and which ones don't?
• Which products are purely price driven as commodity products?
• Which are premium priced products?
• What is your product mix?

If you're unsure about any of the above, then there are a number of management tools that can help you to plot your product range and make the right product decisions.

These include the Boston Consulting Group Matrix, Ansoff Matrix Product Life Cycle Model that we have already talked about. Analysis of your current trading performance is key to really understanding how important each product and or range is to your business. For example if you are constantly receiving complaints about a particular product performance you need to review whether or not to continue to sell this product.