Products & Training

How many products can a company sell?

Large organisations are increasingly complex. This is often the result of a search for growth leading to an ever larger product portfolio. As established products mature and reach their maximal potential in the market, new products are created to keep pursuing overall growth. This strategy is highly common, especially in large multinational companies which may have exhausted other avenues of growth such as geographical expansion and customer lifetime value maximisation.?

This product frenzy leads to a number of organisational challenges, one of which is training.?

Products and their values need to be conveyed through teams of client-facing staff, the most common group being salespeople. If we could explain any number of products to a salesperson within a reasonable time period, we wouldn't have issues with training.

But we can't. We are bound by several limitations.

There's an interesting relationship between the number of products you need to train a sales team on and the training resources required for it, especially time.

At first sight, you might think that, theoretically, the relationship between new products and product training time should be linear.?

If training for one product takes two hours, training for 5 products should take 10 hours.

But it doesn't.

Why??

Additional Products & Training Time

There are a number of reasons why the relationship between new products and hours of training required isn't linear - even if these products are of a similar complexity.

It essentially comes down to the limitations of the human brain.

The human brain does not have unlimited memory, and the memory that is stored can be eroded over time. These two points are the core principles that lead to an ever larger need for training as products pile up.

Here are the mechanisms explaining why each added product pushes us towards an exponential learning curve:

At first, people have enough space in memory. At this stage, adding products does not make much of a difference in training time. However, as people start to reach full capacity, other phenomena kick in.

• 1/ The overload of products lead to more difficulty in learning about new ones, as people reach their limits.

• 2/ More products lead to a rise for new questions, especially on the relationship between these new products and existing ones (typical questions include 'why do we now have X when existing product Z can do something similar?'). This often requires the creation of FAQs.

• 3/ As we are packing an ever-growing amount of products into people's brains, there's a growing need for reinforcements over time. This is a major phenomenon explaining the breaking point in the graph after product 5. The need for reinforcement on 13 products is much, much larger than the need for reinforcement on 2 products.

• 4/ New products searching for market-fit will evolve and require updates. These updates will need to be conveyed through training in order to have up-to-date knowledge. This can dramatically expand the training hours required.

One key danger on this last point is that if people are already at somehow full capacity with a large number of products, updates might not be absorbed on time, or not at all. This creates a backlog of updates, ending up with product knowledge somehow at various levels of irrelevance and outdatedness.

This situation of course calls for even more training and reinforcements.

What can organisations do?

Of course, in some situations organisations do not train their sales team on all of their products. They segment their sales team according to client types. This isn't feasible in all organisations however. In organisations where clients are not well-segmented, there's a need for a salesperson with knowledge of the whole product portfolio in order not to miss matching opportunities.

So, what can we do?

I observed an interesting change on this conundrum at my time at YouGov.

YouGov had a growing product portfolio. Matured products such as BrandIndex were established and highly successful. Growth was pursued through completely new products, but also customisation options on established products.

This dramatically increased the complexity salespeople faced when tacking the full product portfolio.

So what happened?

YouGov decided to follow the first of three strategies I have observed in companies with a similar issue.

• Strategy 1: train and align salespeople on products rather than on accounts, or clients.

In this aspect, the company decides to center their focus on products rather than on accounts, or companies. This means that someone wouldn't be trained to have conversations with banks for example, but would be trained to have conversations about a particular product.

This is a similar setting to the one you encounter when entering an Apple shop. Each island is dedicated to one product, and the salespeople are trained on this specific product. You enter, you ask for AirPods, and you are directed to the AirPods salesperson.

This strategy is good for reducing real product portfolio complexity and increase the depth of product knowledge. However, it is more useful when the client needs can be quickly identified and matched with a product. In situations where this matching process takes time as clients might not know what they need, the matching exercise might hurt the client experience as they are not exposed to all products available or eventually get matched with the wrong product salesperson.

• Strategy 2 : train salespeople on the basics and have support available once the client is matched and qualified.

I have seen this strategy in IT companies with complex products, often Software as a Service where the software platform is complex.

In this strategy, depth is sacrificed for scope. This is a highly strategic decision, as the company decides that they'd rather maximise their matching capabilities by having a salesperson being able to present all available options to a client.

In this case, once the client has been matched, it is important to include specialist support in the conversation. The danger with this strategy is that the client believe that the salesperson doesn't know what they're talking about and isn't capable of solving their problems.

• Strategy 3 : Train salespeople on all products, but have product specialists move through the organisation and push product knowledge.

This scenario is a bit of a mixture of the first two. It is when you decide to train salespeople on all your product portfolio, but become aware of the 4 issues we discussed above. The product specialists in this case are responsible for helping salespeople and pushing updates and knowledge.

The danger here is that the 4 issues discussed above might not be solved. More critically, this decentralises learning and pitch product specialists against one another in a competition for shares of salespeople's brains, which will eventually correlate with shares of sales and the resources invested in the products upon which product specialists get judged. This competition might exacerbate rather than solve issues around updating, overloading and confusion.

Getting the balance right

It is a tough gig to get the balance right in a product portfolio and training. Infuse too many products at once and depth might be lost. Do not infuse enough products and growth might slow down. Focusing singularly on either one of these metrics will lead to issues.

This is a challenge, because it is likely that the responsibilities and objectives driving these decisions belong to different departments. Delivering new products might be a corporate objective sitting with the CEO. Training on new products might belong to L&D and managers.

What is interesting here is that the CEO perspective is outward-looking - it is looking at a potentially ever-expanding share of markets and number of clients. The internal teams responsible for training might in that case be more inward-looking, concerning themselves with learning capacities, overloads, and training time.

One is looking at outwards infinity, the other at inward limitations.

It is critical that all departments work together to strike the right balance.

As the Products & Training chart demonstrates, a growing portfolio might hurt all products, as depth is sacrificed for breadth.

When introducing new products, it is important to have a learning strategy in place that insures the strategic success of these products as a whole and avoid cannibalising on existing products.

Product success is highly correlated to internal learning success.

And learning success cannot be viewed through the lens of one product, as brains have to be shared across many products and the whole organisation.

Companies that get the balance right will have more successful products faster without putting too much of a strain on their staff not putting their existing products at risk.

Learning done right is crucial in supporting your product growth objectives.