Products per customer

The count of distinct product lines a customer bought or holds in the period. Lines, not SKUs. The norm is set per segment from the company's own customers who buy most, and the gap per customer is the norm minus its count.

DefinitionThe count of distinct product lines a customer bought or holds in the period. Lines, not SKUs. The norm is set per segment from the company's own customers who buy most, and the gap per customer is the norm minus its count.

The average misleads

One target for all segments tells the top segment to do nothing and the bottom to do the impossible.

Gap with the lines

A gap of three is a number. The three missing lines, ranked by how often similar customers hold them, are the conversation.

How it is computed

The count of distinct product lines a customer bought or holds in the period, read against the norm for its segment.

Example

A customer holds three lines where the segment norm is five. Across the base the average is 2.9 against 2.6 a year ago.

Where it goes wrong

Counting items, not lines, or including products opened and never used.

Articles that use this term

AI and self-service analytics

A weekly sales digest worth reading: what a good one looks like, line by line

An annotated example of a weekly sales digest built from computed tables: the header that states the period and the checks, ten movements each with the measure, the level, the change, the threshold and the citation, the three lists that follow, untouched, slipped and dormant, the line that says what did not move, and the footer with the definition version. What each element is for, and the version of the same digest that nobody reads.

16 Sept 20263 min read Data quality and reconciliation

B2B customer segmentation from the ledger, not from personas

How to segment a B2B customer base from data the company holds: the two or three fields that make a segment useful for norms, size, sector and channel, why behavioural fields like order frequency and product mix belong in the measures rather than the segment definition, the minimum segment size that makes a norm mean something, the test that a segmentation is good, and why personas do not survive contact with a ledger.

16 Sept 20263 min read Data quality and reconciliation

Baseline and norm: what this account usually does, and what accounts like it do

The difference between a baseline, an account's own typical level from its own history, and a norm, what similar accounts do when the relationship is full, why the two answer different questions, has this account changed and how far is it from where it could be, which measures use which, surge and dormancy against baseline, gap and share against norm, the case where an account is at its baseline and far from the norm, and the rule that both are stated on the line that uses them.

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 Board and management reporting

How to read a movements page: the line to check first, and the line that is not a finding

A reading guide for the movements page of a monthly pack: why the first line to check is any failed identity, not the largest movement, how to tell a movement caused by a definition change or a re-upload from one caused by the business, the citation as the thing to click, the threshold column as the reason a line is there, the within-threshold line as the one that closes the question, and how long the page should take.

16 Sept 20263 min read How-to guides

How to read a norm table: the population, the cell count, and the version

A reading guide for the norm table that every gap on a report depends on: the population column that says which customers the norm was drawn from, the cell count that says how many, the greyed cells under the floor, the method column, median or percentile, the version and date, the norms that moved since last quarter and why, and the test of a good norm table, that a reader can defend any gap on the report by pointing at one row of it.

16 Sept 20263 min read