Go-To-Market Product Confidence Review

The Fulton365 team has managed more than 100,000 product SKUs at various times. 

Before you go to market with your product in any significant way, you need to perform a final go-to-market review to ensure high confidence in your margin and your ability to scale and grow. We will do this review with you and deliver a final spreadsheet that you can use as a template for all future products that you may launch:

1. Create a list of every component of the finished product you are selling.
   1. For food products this includes all ingredients.
   2. For non-food products include every single component needed. 
   3. For service product - see the next step. 
2. Create a list of everything needed to produce your product. 
   1. For food products this includes cooking, blending, etc. 
   2. For non-food products this includes assembly. 
   3. For service products this includes time taken for bidding. 
3. Create a list of everything needed to deliver your product. 
   1. For all products this includes packaging, boxing and shipping. 
   2. For service products this includes time taken for delivering a pitch or presenting your final bid. 
4. Add a cost to every single point listed above:
   1. For all products every ingredient and component should have a price. 
   2. The price of ingredients and components should be broken down to your per product cost.
      1. In other words, if you have to buy 1lb of butter but you are only going to use 4oz, then you need to list 25% of the 1lb of butter as the cost of your product. Or if you make a purse with a metal button and you have to buy 100 buttons, do the math on the per-button cost to make sure your cost per button is accurate.
   3. For service businesses, your cost is your time. And your time should be considered and "Opportunity Cost". In other words, what hourly pay would you be making if you had a traditional job instead of working for yourself? Add that hourly cost to the cost of your product whenever you are driving, pitching, speaking or bid building to create a price. 
5. Summarize the total cost to create 1 single product.
   1. Using our example in bullet #4 - even though you only used 4oz of butter or 1 button, you still had to purchase 1lb of butter or 100 buttons to begin. We need to now look at the total investment required to produce a single product and how many products we could make with the smallest number of components that we have to buy so we know what is left over and we can ask ourselves how confident we are in selling that product. 
   2. This formula will become very important as you scale, as it will outline what your product investment will be to go from selling 1 product a day to 100 products a day. 
   3. For service businesses - This is where you include the number of pitches and bids that you believe you will need to make before you close just 1. We need to know the cost of the rejected bids to make sure that the price of the accepted bids covers all expenses associated with your service. 

With a thorough understand of all the components above, you can go to market with confidence. Every time you sell a product, you will know what you really made in profit over the long run - not what you made in just one single transaction. Every time you submit a bid, you will do so knowing that you are bidding to grow your business, not just bidding to win the next bid. 

Knowing your products equates to long-term sustainability. Knowing your product equates to bold marketing and a confident sales team. Knowing your product, most importantly, equates to happy customers. 

Always begin with the product. Always. 

We are e-commerce owners helping e-commerce owners. While we can show you how to avoid expensive mistakes that we have made, we will also share our own best practices, making us an experienced consultancy based on real data, not hypothetical insights from consultants that teach, but never execute with their own money, at their own risk.