I once worked for a guy who was a very good salesman.  So good, in fact, that he became to believe that the only thing that mattered in the race to meet this month’s revenue numbers was the skill and diligence of the sales force.  We were in the systems business, and the sales were complex, 6 month long relationship sells.  He wasn’t wrong that sales skills were key, but he tripped over the edge when he started to believe that you could OEM any old product and the sales force could turn it into a success.

Products make a difference, just like price, service, promotion, and sales relationships make a difference.  Sell a bad product and it always catches up with you.  It costs you not only the short term support and warranty costs, but in the long term, it kills your brand’s reputation and potential.   Thankfully, most products are not “bad”, they are just mediocre.  Sell a mediocre product, one that is not demonstrably better that the competition, and you will end up giving your profit away to make the sale.  You make it easy for your customer’s purchasing manager to consider nothing other than price.  With every Chinese camera manufacturer selling generic products at dirt cheap prices to anyone who wants to buy, it is frightening that most US manufacturers over the past few years discontinued developing their own differentiated products and instead started to sell commodity OEM product.  Can you imagine Apple adding an MP3 player from Lucky Goldfish Electronics to their product line?

The only chance we have to develop significant revenue and profit growth is to ensure that the company has a balanced portfolio of product, price, and service.  Putting the effort and creativity into developing a superior product is tough and it takes money and time.  The companies that do product development right, however, make it easy for their sales force to look good.