Product line

The top level of a product taxonomy, ten to thirty of them, at which whitespace, products per customer and cross-sell are computed. Families sit beneath, SKUs beneath those. Every SKU has one family and every family one line, dated, and revenue sums identically at every level.

DefinitionThe top level of a product taxonomy, ten to thirty of them, at which whitespace, products per customer and cross-sell are computed. Families sit beneath, SKUs beneath those. Every SKU has one family and every family one line, dated, and revenue sums identically at every level.

The right level per measure

Whitespace on lines; catalogue fit on families; stock-outs and price on SKUs.

Range changes are new rows

A family moved to another line gets a dated row. Overwriting restates every product measure to the start.

How it is used

The top level of the product taxonomy, ten to thirty entries that a salesperson would recognise as a conversation. Whitespace, products per customer and cross-sell are all counted at this level.

Example

A distributor with 60,000 items groups them into fourteen lines. Whitespace is a list of customer and line pairs, not customer and item pairs.

Where it goes wrong

Counting at item level. Every customer has tens of thousands of gaps and none of them is a conversation.

Articles that use this term

Coverage and territory · Sales teams

A new rep's first ninety days, from the data: the list that replaces shadowing

What a newly hired rep should be given on day one from the book they inherit: the accounts ranked by revenue with days since last touch, the returning lines that were bought and dropped, the dormant accounts with their cadence and run rate, the open deals with slip counts, and the tier cadence that says who to call first. A ninety-day plan in three lists, the measures that say whether the ramp is on track, and why it beats a week of shadowing.

16 Sept 20263 min read Wallet share and penetration · Industrial manufacturers

Catalogue fit per customer: how a manufacturer measures the product lines its customers could buy

A method for industrial and component manufacturers to measure, per customer, the product lines bought against the lines customers of that type buy, value the gap, keep direct and distributor channels from double counting, and reconcile to shipped revenue.

16 Sept 20263 min read Wallet share and penetration

Cross-sell and upsell: measuring each from the ledger so they stop being one number

The difference between cross-sell and upsell, how each is computed from the ledger, cross-sell as new product lines at an existing customer and upsell as more of a line already bought, the norm each is measured against, the two lists they produce, and why blending them into one expansion figure hides which of the two a team is good at.

16 Sept 20262 min read Data quality and reconciliation · Industrial manufacturers

Direct and distributor channels without double counting: the manufacturer's reconciliation

How a manufacturer that sells direct and through distributors builds one roll-up where the same shipment is never counted twice: channel as a dimension, separate reconciliation per channel, point-of-sale data where it exists, and the assertion that channels sum to shipped revenue.

16 Sept 20263 min read Board and management reporting

Discount approval thresholds from price realisation data, not from a round number

How a commercial team sets the discount level at which a rep needs approval from what its own invoice lines show: the distribution of discounts given, the discount at which win rate stops improving, the reps and product lines where discounts cluster just under the current threshold, the revenue given away between the effective and the agreed discount, and the threshold per product line that follows, with the approval volume it will generate.

16 Sept 20263 min read Wallet share and penetration · Healthcare and med-tech

GPO contract compliance and product depth per facility for healthcare suppliers

How a medical device, supplies or services company builds one view per hospital from distributor tracings, GPO reports and direct sales: product lines bought against the facility's profile, contracts signed but unused, territory coverage per manager, and the reconciliation to traced and invoiced sales.

16 Sept 20263 min read